I see sex work as somewhat analogous to coal mining. It’s not that it isn’t real work, or that those who work in that capacity don’t deserve rights, dignity, or a society that works for them. The problem, of course, is the ever-present exploitation of the workers coupled with the severe unpleasantness of the occupation which ensures that the people who do work these jobs are those with few other options. That isn’t to say that all sex workers and/or coal miners are miserable. Even so, the patterns around this kind of work are unmistakable.
Given these facts, I think most reasonable people understand that sex work should go extinct. That isn’t to say that you can’t make pornography or have sex with strangers. However, it’s impossible to gauge enthusiastic consent when money is changing hands, and enthusiastic consent is a vital component for an ethical sexual encounter.
My question for the community is how exactly this is meant to be accomplished. How can sex work be abolished without harming the very people it’s meant to protect? The number one problem western sex workers face, more so than creepy clients, is the cops, who profile them, steal their wages, and arrest them on a whim. Clearly, criminalizing sex work hasn’t done much for sex workers. What are some alternatives?
Sex work
100+ comments, checks out
100+ comments? Check. People banned in the comments? Check. Porn being mentioned again? Check.
It’s sex workers question time
So I’ve guided (retired?) sex workers in the past. I wouldn’t overreact if I said that out of a room of 200 sex workers, 1 or 2 would do it because they wanted to. The rest was either trafficked or forced into it.
I fully support sex workers and their orgs in protests, unionizing and activism and I fully support orgs trying to help them with the work or help them escape. Their struggle to change the industry is a thing they need to have control of, as they are the ones being a part of it.
Personally, I don’t see a point in trying to regulate an industry that is filled with so much suffering. I always figured that if the people involved got the chances to do something else in life, 99.9% of them would. In a society where these people wouldn’t have to rely on sex to survive, sex work isn’t needed. That doesn’t mean that a free sexual moral wouldn’t exist. Quite the opposite, I think.
I’d also be curious as to what “wanting to” really means in such a misogynistic society that necessarily is internalized by everyone including (especially) sex workers. At best, “wanting to” engage in sex work really just means wanting to have sex anyway, and does not legitimize sex work in any way, IMO.
I personally only have met white, already well off women that wanted to do sex work. You know, people that were stuck in a job or got out of a long relationship and somehow became a high end escort, with a lot of freedom of choice. That´s the people I refer to that want to do this. They do exist (in very, very small numbers).
I didn’t meant to use them to legitimize sex work.
I wasn’t trying to imply that at all! Just curious to hear what your experience was. And frankly, your response was exactly what I expected but didn’t want to assume. Sounds like something similar to poverty LARPing where ruling class/petty bourgeois people engage in things oppressed people have to deal with as some sort of fantasy.
Few more articles to add:
- Esperanza - A Socialist, Feminist, and Transgender Analysis of “Sex Work” .
- RevLeft Radio interview with Comrade Brigid and Esperanza - Proletarian Feminism, Women’s Liberation, and the Sex Trade.
- Kollontai - Prostitution and ways of fighting it
- Esperanza - The problem with sex-trade expansionary Feminism.
Something odd about the Kollontai piece is that she doesn’t mention pimps and organised prostitution rings. Maybe they weren’t that much of an issue during that time but I doubt it. While it’s difficult to punish clients, organisers of such rings are easily discernable and easier to punish. They profit off of forcing women into prostitution and make it hard for them to get out of it. In fact, I would guess that these organisers (almost entirely men) are the major benefactors of sex work and porn and the material benefit seen by the victimised women probably dwarfs in comparison.
Pornography should also be extinct. Consent under capitalism in porn is dubious at best and is still exploitative, and it objectifies the people in it mostly of which are women.
The solution is simply to improve living standards and worker conditions so that they have no need to go into sex work. Sex work should not be legalized period.
pornography addiction is a symptom of an intensely isolated society. Like most things, pornography won’t disappear but will change its shape and purpose in a society without capitalist reproduction.
That’s a bit economistic, there will need to be a massive cultural revolution in the west to fix the gender contradictions that goes beyond just improving living standards and worker conditions. Can’t speak to the rest of the world although I know similar contradictions are present thanks in large part to Christian missionaries.
Totally agreed on pornography though, it is very harmful to women and queer folk (and men too, mostly in different ways). Society would have to be fundamentally different before sexual material like that could exist in a healthy way.
I think that’s the crux of the issue that is often missing in so many conversations about the validity of sex work as work. Humans should be free to embrace all of the positives that come out of sexual relationships. And that includes things like erotica and sexual release as a form of therapy. These things can add value to society.
But like, you said, society would have to be fundamentally different to even begin having that conversation. Because our cultural perspectives on sex are all part of the superstructure rooted in our economic base. And under capitalism, it’s all coercive. And if sex work is coercive, like all other work under capitalism, then what we’re talking about is rape and rape glorification. We can’t seriously have the conversation about the validity of sex work, etc. if we can’t tear down this system first.
Yeah, no one is calling the Kama Sutra pornography. We know the difference.
Is pornography still exploitative if no money changes hands? I figure if I want to put my ass on the internet for free, there’s nothing wrong with that, right? I’m not sure how that specific kind of pornography relates to capitalism.
And what about drawn pornography? Are we coming after the furries? lol
Obligatory copy pasta:
"Alright time’s up. Let me spell it out for you then.
For the millionth time: You don’t get to jerk off to filmed rape under socialism.
Every socialist state that ever existed has banned porn.
Yes, porn is coercive as every form of wage labor is. But it is not just any wage labor, but labor involved in the social production of art - in this case reactionary art.
Why is it reactionary? Its ideological content is. It objectifies - or more precisely, commodifies (primarily female) bodies. It dehumanizes women. It is the reason why you have white people going around fetishizing Asian women.
Porn fits into the capitalist superstructure which reproduces the institutions of patriarchy, and by extension, of capitalism itself. It has no place in a socialist society. The suppression of pornography then isn’t simply the suppression of commodity production, it would be similar to the suppression of any other reactionary cultural product (music, films, etc…).
Now for the infamous FAQs:
“But what if I film me and my girlfriend having sex with the consent of both parties?”
First of all, if you have to ask that, your girlfriend is most likely imaginary. I don’t know about white amerikans, but in my part of the world, nobody does that. Uploading sex tapes is considered a form of humiliation, and thus it’s a punishable crime. People have committed suicide over this. No one who has healthy relationships would ask their girlfriend: “Hey can I upload a video of us having sex?”
Secondly, the question makes no sense. It’s like saying “not all white people are racist”. You are talking about a social phenomenon with a systemic role that only exists in relation to a set of conditions, individualizing it only obscures the point. Porn isn’t just “capturing two people having sex”, that’s ahistorical view which abstracts away from all social context. If that’s porn, ancient paintings of people having sex would be porn, and if that’s the case “porn” would be meaningless as a category of analysis. Pornography presupposes the capitalist mode of production, the productive forces developed to a sufficient level so this phenomenon can even take place in the first place (the means to circulate these videos like the internet or other distribution channels, the filming equipment), patriarchy, etc…
Let me give you an example: Money is only money in relation to commodity production as the universal equivalent. On a desert island it would just be useless pieces of paper. Porn is no different. It is a social phenomenon that only exists in relation to the larger capitalist-patriarchal superstructure. If you film you and your girlfriend having sex on a desert island, yeah sure, then it’s “consensual”, and it’s not even “porn” anymore. But you don’t live on a desert island. You live in a society where all of the conditions I mentioned exist. The “amateur sex tapes” you upload in a capitalist society will inevitably conforms to logic of profitability that predominates a capitalist society - which is why, as someone has mentioned below, “amateur sex tapes” are commodified, and thus aren’t even really “amateur” (This is the reality no matter how the internet in the neoliberal era has masked it as “liberating” since “everyone’s a content producer”). And once you’ve accepted that, its’ not hard to see why there’s no such thing as “non-patriarchal” porn: Commodities have a use-value: in order to be sold, they have to be socially necessary. If you’re uploading “amateur sex tapes” in a society where people who consume those tapes are people who consume “professional porn”, the your tapes will have to mirror “professional porn” in its ideological content. Meaning, all those elements of objectification and fetishization remain. Your “amateur” sex tapes necessarily conform to the larger cultural logic of capitalism, and thus , they fit into that larger reactionary ideological superstructure. In other words, in the grand scheme of things, the distinction between “amateur” and “professional” porn is meaningless, and so are your individual motives.
Finally, you have a nonsensical view of consent. In the same way that wage labor isn’t truly “consensual”, those who “consented” to filming amateur porn faces the systemic pressures of capitalist-patriarchy.
“What if people still want to film themselves having sex under communism?”
We have established that porn is a social phenomenon, an industry under capitalism. Would there still be isolated cases of people filming themselves having sex under socialism that is separated from the logic of commodity production? Maybe. But considering that this has never happened in any socialist society up to this point, why do you insist on asking this question? Fantasies are not real, but they have very real implications about the worldview of those who came up with them. So why do petit-bourgeois Western men find it impossible to envision a “liberating society” without the existence of sex tapes? The answer I think, is quite obvious."
First of all, if you have to ask that, your girlfriend is most likely imaginary. I don’t know about white amerikans, but in my part of the world, nobody does that. Uploading sex tapes is considered a form of humiliation, and thus it’s a punishable crime. People have committed suicide over this. No one who has healthy relationships would ask their girlfriend: “Hey can I upload a video of us having sex?”
I found this part a bit strange. Some people really do want to upload their sextapes for the world to see. I know plenty of people who have healthy relationships that are willing to do this.
This do seems to be cultural stuff. In Poland this would be at best incredibly embarassing and at worst social death.
Probably yes. I live in a very sex positive, body positive environment so there would be less shame in talking about sex, sex itself, being naked etc. It’s not the norm everywhere but I’m aware of that.
Maybe it’s different here in the US, but my gf has filmed us together before. It wasn’t my idea but I didn’t care, its what my partner wanted and I trust her. it’s a personal thing and as long as we both know we aren’t sharing it, why not? it harms nobody, it fulfills a kink for 2(or more) consenting adults, I don’t think we should instantly be saying that all video is commodified, we aren’t uploading those videos anywhere and to 99.9999% of the world, that video doesn’t exist. But to me and my gf(and probably a small handful of FBI, NSA, CIA perverts) the video means something and it means so much more when we both know it is personal and not for commodification or profit. Just my 2 cents as someone who has been involved in this without making any money or views off of my “content” if you can even call it that since only 1 person sees it.
On a desert island it would just be useless pieces of paper. Porn is no different.
So you’re saying if I take my porn stash to a desert island I can consume it ethically?
(j/k obvs)
Porn is a multi-billion dollar industry, that is essentially filmed rape. However consensual the actors appear to be, if their livelihoods and ability to pay rent depend on views, then that goes against the very definition of consent.
1“If no money exchanges hands” I know it’s not what you meant, but that could be sex slavery. 2 most drawn stuff is pretty problematic too, but I’m sure we could fix that by fixing alienation in other ways.
Step 1: Depose capitalism and liberate the working class.
That’s it. You can do anything you like to abolish sex work, but if capitalism remains fhen economic coercion will remain and sex work will eventually come back. When capitalism is gone, the economic coercion that makes transactional sex exploitative/unethical is gone.
This is 100% it. In a society that has moved past capitalism into socialism/communism there won’t be sex work because people won’t need it for income.
is this our site’s own little recurrent struggle session?
No, it is every single leftist space recurring struggle session*. For some reason nothing else cause so much emotion so fast and so often.
*In the internet that is, IRL it is discussed much much less often.
I think “what constitutes genuine socialist patriotism” is more of a recurrent struggle session on this site, along with the somewhat related “is the Russian Federation just a useful ally at this point, or a based anti-imperialist country which is on the way back to socialism?”
But with regard to the sex work question – I honestly don’t get why it’s such an emotional topic, or why so many otherwise intelligent people start arguing like liberals the moment it’s broached. We can argue all day about whether sex is “sacred” or not, but the fact of the matter is, it’s certainly something having to do with human connection, and connection on a deeply personal level. Now when any other type of personal relationship becomes an industry, Marxists are rightly angry. If some enterprising capitalist, for instance, started a “Friend for Hire” service, each one of us here would mock and denounce it as a heartless commodification of a basic human interaction. However, when sex (something much less essential to human beings than friendship) is introduced into the equation, so many self-proclaimed Marxists start commodifying right alongside the dumbest NYT liberals.
However, when sex (something much less essential to human beings than friendship)
I don’t understand why some people say sex is something less essential than friendship. If this were really the case:
- Why do most humans have a sexual drive? Hell, some people even have a higher sexual drive than normal.
- Why do certain groups of people keep plotting schemes just to have a fling with another person?
- Why does the concept of “Ni’kah Mutah”, or “Temporary Marriage” exist despite Muslims being told not to do pre-martial sex?
Sure, you could suggest that people could just pleasure themselves (or not) to control their sexual drives, but most religions forbid it; forcing the religious to seek the above two methods.
You could even suggest people to “channel” their horniness to something more productive, but most people wouldn’t be able to get that done, likely because the horniness would cloud/distract your brain from getting things done.
Because plenty of people can function normally without sex, and a few even willingly give it up (Ho Chi Minh was one). People who are completely without friends, on the other hand, tend almost always to sink into deep depression, and even suicide. I’m aware that there are people who have killed themselves over sexlessness, but you almost always find that these individuals are isolated in other ways, and are in fact making sexual desire a sort of proxy for their natural desire for companionship. Look at Elliot Rogers. Sexlessness was clearly not the root cause of this guy’s issues.
Of course people are horny; nobody is denying that. But people have an even stronger drive for companionship, because humans are species beings. Ask yourself: would you, given the choice, either have (1) no friends, but all the one-night stands you could possibly desire, or (2) friends, but no sex for the rest of your life? Depending on one’s level of sexual drive (this varies between individuals), it might not be an easy choice, but most people over 14 would ultimately choose the latter.
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Hardly anyone is pure, and most people will take sex when they can get it – it’s just that they suffer more from friendlessness than they do from sexlessness. And nobody commits rape out of some sort of need. That they do is honestly incel rhetoric.
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You would denounce “friend for hire” as heartless commodification? Do you oppose professional therapists?
They never have an answer for this.
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Coal is (or at least was) a necessary product. Sex isn’t and never was. And the people who can’t function without it need psychiatric treatment, not reinforcement of their illness which will absolutely make it worse.
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The issue of consent. If you can’t get paid for your blood because that constitutes coersion and therefore invalidates consent, why should it be different for sex, where the propensity for permanent, life ruining harm is orders of magnitudes higher than blood?
If two consenting adults just want to have recreational sex with each other, why is payment a necessary element? And if they wouldn’t have had sex without the payment aspect, then it isn’t recreational sex. Just find a person (or people) you vibe well with and who is interested in having sex with you if you want to do it in moderation, or if you suffer from sex addiction, seek professional help and bring yourself past that.
And for that “well these people are doing sex work to provide for themselves and their family” the fact that there are people doing that is a sign of a broken system that is utterly failing to support them and their families through other ways. If they like it, it’s not the paid sex they like, they like the fact that they and their family are not starving. It’s basically Stockholm syndrome.
That’s the important part: banning sex work is not banning recreational or extramarital sex. Adults can still have sex with each other if they want, and by taking the payment aspect out of it, it can be even more fulfilling and conducive to forming long-term bonds. A la Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs, get the survival requirements squared away, then people can move onto deciding if they want to have sex for free on top of that, and if they do, they can find confidence in knowing that they’re likely doing it of their own accord, because they like doing it or because they like the person they’re with, and not because they need money.
Good points
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I’ve read quite a few testimonies on the page, and they don’t seem to be glamorising or even saying they enjoy prostitution; what most seem to be saying is that they would like not to be seen as criminals, which is a fair demand as it prevents them from accessing resources.
Several people in the thread either were sex workers or know sex workers. One of the proletarian feminist writers linked to in another thread, Esperanza, was formerly a sex worker. It’s not like they’re being ignored.
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I’d like to add to the overall discussion that the sex trade has been legalized, in Turkiye and Germany, and yet they remain top spots for human trafficking victims and the supposed rights afforded to people within the trade often look more like infringements. Brothels being state-run is just a double whammy that has effectively turned both states into mega-pimps.
Germany was and still is the main destination of human trafficking in Europe.
In Poland getting paid for sex is legal, but pimping and brothels are illegal. Of course that don’t stopped nothing at all. Pimps are “bodyguards” and brothels are “dance clubs” or “resteurations” which hire rooms for people “wanting” to spend some time with eachother. As long as there is something else to officially pay for, it’s operating in the open.
Btw this is used in a peculiar small time tax evasion method. The argument of state being a pimp was actually used, and sex services are not taxed. Therefore i heard about few cases where some otherwise legit income or gifts was declared “sex service” in order to evade tax.
Thanks for the added, harrowing context. One of the funniest (not funny haha) justifications Wikipedia, “non-SWERFs” et al. seem to like to make for this legalization is that it allows the state to more accurately track STDs like HIV and AIDS. You know, a great alternative to fucking subsidizing and nationalizing the healthcare system is to fund and create spaces where people are 100x more likely to catch said STDs, right? 🙄
I don’t believe any sex worker unions support the German model. The workers I’ve listened to are asking for the New Zealand solution, which is decriminalization.
we have this specific fight a lot and its nice to see a firm party line on the question being represented. I got tired arguing the last one too lol.
As much as I strongly dislike the idea of women selling sex and prostitutes, I am afraid I am confronted with the reality of such being the result of poverty and stigmatization. We should address poverty, add education, and stop the stigma.
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I see it as quite different to coal-mining in many ways. The coal miner never digs coal in their personal lives just for fulfillment or fun, sex is absolutely a human interaction and any commodification of that special human connection is fucking disgusting. I’m no “sex is between a loving couple” type, I could give less than one single shit about who is fucking, if people are putting out quickly or not, I don’t care. But when sex becomes a way of making money, and sex is obviously a private thing, abuse is inevitable. And that’s not even to mention how prostitution’s consent works. I am absolutely not a “Sex work is work” person. Yes it is work, but is it socially necessary or even helpful to the people that do it? I would argue that it doesn’t. It’s an illegal industry(I in no way want it to be misconstrued or misinterpreted, I absolutely support the prostitute’s struggle and they should not be arrested for this) that has no testing or training whatsoever, it has no basis for wages or benefits or unionization. I absolutely hope all prostitutes can get to a better place in life, because I don’t think anyone should be in the sex industry. Obviously some people DO get into this industry on purpose, hats off to them I suppose but if it meant kicking out all the consenting prostitutes in exchange for freeing the marginalized masses that are forced ( “voluntarily” or totally involuntarily) into sex, the answer is pretty obvious to me.
Prostitution is indeed not work. In a work or labour relationship, the proletariat sells their labour power; their capacity to work is their commodity. Prostitutes are those who have not even that labour power to sell and so they must resort to selling the only thing they have left, their own body. Thus they live on the fringe of the proletariat class and experience oppression in its purest, harshest form. This comes from Esperanza’s medium article, an ex-prostitute. She also doesn’t use the term sex work because she was a prostitute meeting up with clients in their cars or motels, not an onlyfans content creator or a camgirl.
And this relationship of being even below the oppressed class has existed throughout history. Some slaves were not r*ped, but many slave women were. In feudalism, serfs were tied to the land and had to work on it. Prostitutes were even lower than the serf as they could not work on the land for whatever reason, which meant they were of no use to the lord and thus not allowed his protection.
Prostitutes are even exploited by the proletariat itself (and indeed were exploited by their own class in history); proletarian men create a false consciousness for themselves where they seek to attain bourgeois status and thus buy the services of the prostitute. It is inter-class warfare.
Prostitutes are proletariat but do not perform labour. Tbh there’s some marxism that goes out the window in some people the moment this topic comes up, as if prostitution was something inherently different or special to consider under its own rules. There’s petit-bourgeois women in porn, and there’s the proletarian victims that get trafficked by pimps. The two never intersect even if their job is the same. The victims need help to get out of this situation and an actual solution. The petit bourgeois will get with the program and get an actually productive job no matter how much they loathe it.
I in no way mean this as being crude, it’s literally just the best way I can describe it. I feel like prostitutes that have no pimp that essentially owns them and their labor, the ones that sell their sex by themselves, I view it almost like a street vendor that owns their own stand on the sidewalk of a busy city, insofar as they are not selling their labor to any other individual but they still further a market economy nonetheless. Obviously I still take issue with my comparison as these street vendors DO (like I mentioned in another comment before) have standards that they must adhere to. If a street vendor has a rat in their ketchup and cockroaches all over their buns and hot dogs, they will be shut down and have their permit removed. The same protection does not exist for prostitution as it is a black(some would argue gray market due to “meet-up services” that duck the law by promising an encounter rather than promising sex which is illegal, but obv those are just bourgeois routes of legality, it’s still prostitution but under another name of companionship) market and the law treats the sex worker as a criminal rather than a small business owner that would be revoked for lets say getting an STI, I still don’t really know what “sex work advocates” want when it comes to STIs, which I imagine are unfortunately common. If they are tested and are positive for an STI, under this legal market of sex, either it becomes a very dark dystopia where you pay extra for “clean prostitutes” while the “infected” ones go broke while still legally working and spreading STIs all the while suffering through their exploitative job, desperately needing a cure but not being deemed worthy enough by the market to afford to live, Or is this regulated better and you just lay off the ones with STIs? Then the people who had turned to prostitution because they have no other viable alternatives(I.E, most of them), they probably go homeless if they aren’t already and they most likely die. In any legal situation for prostitution I just see things going horribly wrong in so many ways. And that’s just dealing with the topic of STIs, I don’t even wanna talk about how they would have to go about dealing with abuse. Sorry for the long rambling message, it’s just that you brought up good points and it made me think more. Thanks comrade
Exactly. Coal-mining (or whatever form of extraction the current form of energy-production requires) is materially necessary for the reproduction of society. Thus it is linked to real wealth production and real economic growth, the material base from which all of human society arises. Now are there legitimate human enterprises, and legitimate forms of economic activity, which do not work to advance the economic base? Of course there are – owning a mom-and-pop restaurant, for example, or being a concert violinist. But as these sorts of enterprises are materially unnecessary, they have no particular right to exist, and are to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis; if they are or become exploitative, the state should shut them down. As you pointed out, sex work seems to be the sort of thing which is almost automatically exploitative. Since it fulfills no materially useful function (i.e., it is something we can very well do without), it has no place under socialism.
Also, why are we rehashing this topic again? I would have thought we’d done it enough on r/genzedong.
If you’re tired of this now. Just wait until this place is linked with a certain oddly shaped bear lemmy instance. They are going to throw multiple, probably monthly shit-fits about the Marxist take on that and break into angry rants about us being “Swerfs”.
I get not having the Marxist take on it for a place like that, I don’t get banning the Marxist take as “reactionary” which they do.
Is the site majority anarchist? I know it’s riddled with them, but overall I haven’t seen disastrous foreign policy takes.
Most of the people who run it, and a good amount of their userbase, are based Marxists. They do have some anarchists, new leftists, or streamer-brained liberals, but that wouldn’t mean that we wouldn’t federate with them, nor is it required that our two instances adopt the exact same policies or moderation styles. We have a good relationship with them, and there’s zero reason to have isolated islands rather than a united left fediverse.
Once we do federate, if there are specific users that are so liberal that they become a problem, they can be banned, but that doesn’t mean we’d de-federate by any means.
Oh I know, I’m so excited to federate with them, I just was curious with the much more unhinged nature of it, but that could also be size, if it was majority anarchist.
Don’t get me wrong I love Hexbear, just a little taken aback with the “Swerf” take.
When you type my username into the search bar on Lemmygrad, my top comment from r/genzedong is literally on this topic😂🤣it’s about how Sexting is not a problem imo, it’s just 2 people fulfilling a kink and since no money is traded, why make an imaginary issue of what is essentially just people sending pictures to one another.
RIP r/genzedong, but the site did have a certain measure of that overall reddit horniness
My head is hurting today so please nobody Horny bonk me but I kinda missed it lmao
Stalin says: when you stop the horny, the bonking stops, and when bonking stops, the hurting stops…
But seriously, feel better soon comrade!
Lol I was just joking, my head is fine, but I WAS serious about not being horny bonked😈 /s
All right, no excuse, here they come:
Also I completely agree, a mom and pop restaurant, while not entirely socially necessary, does have a standard to follow, if they have rats running around the kitchen they get shut down, if a prostitute is lied to by a client and receives an STI, they are hampered by their new health risk and they are likely not able to leave their corner because they need to pay for treatment. It’s a sad reality but how can we as humans make an excuse for this by saying “sex work is work”? I personally think there are too many glaring flaws in prostitution and sex work to support it.
The coal miner never digs coal in their personal lives just for fulfillment or fun, sex is absolutely a human interaction and any commodification of that special human connection is fucking disgusting.
You can make this same critique against any service industry work that involves intimate, personal human interaction: hair care, therapy, life coaching, etc. Some people need more trust and connection to another person for these services than they do for sex.
As comrade juchebot said, non-essential things must be evaluated on a case by case basis, some things like therapy or art are socially positive despite being materially unnecessary, unlike the sex industry which is neither.
Sex work is exploitation. It is the commodification of sex which, like all other commodities, was intended for use and not for exchange to make a profit from the exploitation of the sex worker. Sex workers should be treated the same as any other exploited worker. Still, it only differentiates in how they are exploited, i.e. a wage worker is exploited through the extraction of surplus value. In contrast, the sex worker is exploited due to the fact the sex worker and the buyer of the sex enter into a relationship where money is exchanged; therefore, due to money being the reason for the sex and not individual want, it can not be considered consensual, hence exploitative, you have other examples like this but on a bigger scale with the porn industry etc.
Personally, I used to cam model and it was the same labour relation as gig work because I worked for a pretty much gig-economy type company who paid me based on my income and took a cut, with added levels of misogynist exploitation. To me the issue is that late stage capitalism produces not what is needed for society but what is needed for the reproduction of the capitalist system itself, which depends on the subjugation of women. All workers are subjected to supply and demand within labour markets, and unemployment is emportant to keep wages low. Sex work can be a way out of wage suppression workers face in more ‘legitimate’ labour relations, so it is a sensible thing in terms of workers acting in their own interests within a broken system. Also sex workers are pretty well organised both in terms of demands as workers and networks of support and solidarity in many places around the world. Like all workers are, some are coerced in to it by fucked up systems, some are doing alright and aren’t precarious. Personally, I wouldn’t really expect leftist on a fake-reddit website to have the best ideas in the interests of a community that’s probably more active and pragmatic than a lot of the posters here, so I would take a lot of people’s musings with a grain of salt. Even my own, I have been out of that world a while and am far from precarious, so can’t speak for them. But I think their unions and organising is cool and should generally be supported as its the self determination of those people.
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Not sure if the condescension towards comrades here was necessary or warranted. While there are likely to be people speaking from positions of no experience, you also don’t know that.
Another point too: just because not all of us were directly in the sex trade, doesn’t mean we don’t know people who were, or haven’t heard their stories. As arundati roy said: once you know of oppression, you’re culpable, and its your duty to spread awareness, and not stay quiet just because you don’t have direct experience.
The “argument by position” quickly becomes liberal tokenism, and can easily be used to silence people who are against undeniably terrible things. For some reason too with the sex trade, its always the independently wealthy bourgeois “lifestylist” prostitutes, who can leave the trade at any time, and who in reality make up 1% of the people in the sex trade, who presume to speak for the 99% of people trapped there, who have no ability to escape for fear of starvation.
Absolutely. Personally I have considered it before because I’m nigh destitute. The fact that I’d let strangers do those things to me when my relationship with sex is otherwise very complicated and requires a lot of trust to get to that level in any normal relationship says a lot to me about how fucked it all is. I’ve had relationships fracture and disintegrate because my partners felt it necessary to engage with the sex trade. There is no comparable feeling to knowing your partner is being raped for cash, while you just sit there and wait for them to get home, just hoping they don’t get murdered. Telling your partner your worries yet knowing they’re an adult and you can’t and shouldn’t control them – them responding “I need the money.” Is this what liberation looks like? Is this what fucking feminism looks like??
However to your main point my experience with it doesn’t mean my opinions outweigh others’ on the subject either, of course. There is some truth to liberal idpol and laning discourse culture that kills fruitful conversation in its tracks. The problem arises when people who have done no studying, have no experience, and are not at-risk make shitty dehumanizing takes from no authority… “no investigation, no right to speak” as it were. But laning is not conducive to healthy conversation, either.
I know how you feel. I have dear friends who have recently started escorting. They say they feel “powerful” and “liberated.” They’re also relatively privileged people who don’t actually need to exploit themselves. They just like lonely rich men paying for their vacations and luxuries.
Which is just another example of how the people who “benefit” from this rehabilitation of the rape trade are often petite-bourgeois (sex entrepeneurs to be more correct, not “workers”) and how the rape trade actively exploits and harms men as well.
Meh I guess I’m reacting to the fact that ‘the sex work question’ is so often a theoretical debate completely detached from the people actually doing that work. Hopefully comrades have the self awareness to know if it’s not directed at them.
“Leftists” on “fake-reddit”, etc. It didn’t seem like a critique of a subset of individuals but rather a blanket condemnation of these discussions wholesale. I can understand your concerns but this is not reddit or twitter and most everyone here operates under the baseline that people in the sex trade are human beings and not ideological props as the so-called internet leftist likes to weaponize them as.
OK 🫶
I think the confusion results from liberals’ willful conflation of “supporting sex workers” with “supporting the sex industry.” In fact the whole language of support is probably so loaded and compromised at this point that it may be better to abandon it altogether. We don’t “support” sex workers in the sense of affirming their career “choice,” which (as you pointed out) in 99.9% percent of cases isn’t really a choice; rather, we support them as exploited members of the working class who are caught up in an inhuman industry. And a crucial part of that support is wanting to destroy the industry. Thus our messaging to sex workers should be the same as our messaging to the many people caught up in dead-end, unnecessary service-sector jobs: “we get that your job is exploitative, we want to take it away and give you something socially meaningful to do – something which you can be proud of as a human being and for which you will be properly compensated.” That, I think, is a much better way to reach people.
I agree with you. This community has such prude views of sex. It’s so weird.
Pornography and prostitution is not sex at all. The two are completely different and only resemble each other superficially.
Calling people prudes over this issue is something that I address in an essay I wrote some time ago (linked in another comment here). It effectively shuts down any possible discussion before it even happens because one can just say “oh you just don’t like sex!” and leave it at that.
The implied link to reactionary forces (missionaries, puritans) with this argument is intellectually dishonest to do to another comrade.
All of it is sex and people here do mental gymnastics for no other reason than cultural reasons and conservative behavior.
It actually degrades the sex worker and continues the same stigma towards sex.
All sex work between adults should be legal. Prudish beliefs really need to change.
A month later and giving me the exact same argument as before without having listened to any points :|
Cause your points are based on nothing but your feelings and cultural upbringing.
That’s it.
Also this site shut down for some reason.
I would sincerely reply to your (new) comments in this month old thread, but clearly you’re not interested in changing your mind or listening to anything anyone has to say. Tbh you haven’t really made any point, just said everyone else was prudish and conservative etc etc. Which I also told you back then was insulting towards comrades who are decidedly not conservative. Was anyone here saying prostitutes are loose women with low morals? Was anyone here saying that prostitutes should be jailed for accepting clients? Was anyone here saying that sex should only happen between two married people? Or even between a married man and woman?
No. And you know that, because you replied to most comments.
I think you’re just here to be a contrarian and a wrecker, and have no actual interest in this topic. I don’t understand how you can call yourself a Marxist and decide not to analyse the material reality of prostitution which has been laid out several times in this thread. Well, I can understand it in one situation – if your goal is to exhaust everyone in a pointless debate.
Clearly you display no comradely behaviour (even telling another user that they were “gaslighting”) and so I’m not sure what you expect to find on Lemmygrad. The only justification I keep coming back to that makes sense is that your goal is to stir up drama and pointless debates by making us do all the legwork of finding arguments and sources which you’ll just dismiss with a “I disagree lol”. Why else revive a month-old thread?
Consider this my complete reasoning behind your ban.
In my opinion it should be regulated while under capitalism, abolishing can only be done in socialism and still you need to put in place a real system to get these people to not work there anymore. China IMO hasn’t handled that very well since it’s not legal but clearly there are still prostitutes working there.
They’re definitely not doing the best, but at least they don’t make it super easy for kids to randomly come across porn, and I think they’ve got some sort of plan for improving on the issue
Don’t forget Hollywood industry who literally makes kids who are like 14 kiss for scenes in movies, and even if sometimes the actors are older, the characters themselves are 14-16.
I think that last bit about China is a bit unfair. Murder is illegal everywhere, and everywhere there’s murder. It doesn’t mean murder generally isn’t being “handled well.” I’d be more curious about the volume and nature of sex work in China.
As in all socialist countries, the rape industry is 100% illegal in China, and one of the very first things the communists did was to dismantle the sex trade, as one of the pillars of women’s oppression.
Well, I mean, murder is for sure something that’s going to happen under any political system regardless, people will not get along with some other people for a lot of reasons, but labour in the form of sexual exploitation is definitely something that could not exist, and the idea of abolishing should be a step in that direction. I’m sure with time they will sort it out, I just think they probably abolish it too early due to a lot of cultural factors.
