Sex “work”

a socialist critique of prostitution apologetics and liberal linguistic legerdemain (edited & re-published from the original in 2019)

Liberal feminist perspectives on prostitution have focused the policy and scholarly debates on the need to protect the rights of women to choose prostitution. (emphasis added]

— Cheryl Nelson Butler

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich as well as poor from begging in the streets, stealing bread, and sleeping under bridges.

— Anatole France

Liberals and the neo-gnostic, Scientology-like cult of neo-Nietzschean gender-warriors would have you believe that prostitution is exactly like taking a job at Lowe’s or Burger King. They have an approved vocabulary, which they’ve partially succeeded in forcing onto the metropolitan petit bourgeois left, and a question-begging vocabulary that employs words as stealth premises, then buries their own dogmatic conclusions in those words — like smuggling a dog’s medication into a piece of cheese.

One of their approved terms is “sex work.” More amazing than this bullshit term’s general acceptance has been how “sex work” stealth premises dripped into the ostensibly anti-capitalist “left” like a morphine IV, where it’s been incorporated now at the cellular level.

“Sex work” is a capitalist term, beginning to end—the reduction of human relations to economic transactions between the homos economicii of the liberal imaginary.

In an issue of DSA’s Democratic Left last year [2019], an issue ostensibly dedicated to “socialist feminism,” Angel Castillo wrote an article called “Decriminalizing Sex Work,” which was a kind of neoliberal paean applied to the question of prostitution, emblematic of the larger anti-feminist turn on the left. Truthfully, feminism had always found the left to be hard, sometimes even inhospitable, ground; but now the neo-Nietzscehan hipsters and vocabulary police have driven out whole sections of feminists—at least those who recognize that men are not women and that prostitution is a particularly heinous form of female exploitation.

Castillo started with an issue of law, so I will, too.

On the question of law and prostitution, there are three dominant approaches. Two are phallocentric. The first approach is what I call phallocentric-traditional. This is the conservative phallocentric approach that sees prostitution as some form of moral failure on the part of those who are prostituted — mostly women with substantial numbers of them being underage. The second approach is the (phallocentric) neoliberal, for which I put the modifier in parentheses to emphasize how liberal mystifications conceal the deeply phallocentric origins of both capitalism and libertarian/liberalism. Neoliberal ideology is simply capitalist ideology in its most recent and more global form.

The liberal-patriarchal roots of these ideologies has been perfunctorily concealed by liberal legal abstraction. The third approach is feminist — woman-centered, with women being human females; feminism that seeks the emancipation of women from various forms of male exploitation and abuse, and not merely the pseudo-emancipation of making a few women as powerful as a few men.

This ancient seventies feminism points out that within many social structures — even on the left — women (on the whole) are frequently structurally disadvantaged by men’s power as men. That social, political, and economic disadvantage is the condition within which many women are entrapped, and it underwrites the conditions of the vast majority of women who are conscripted into commodifying their very bodies to satisfy men’s “entitlement” to sex.

The left has fallen for the okeydoke on sex, because so much of the left — as evidenced by that DSA article — has adopted a liberal naturalistic fallacy about sex, reducing it to a morally-neutralized instantiation of “natural appetites,” like the hunger I can simply satisfy at the local McDonalds (think about that!).

Ah, I remember those old days when “the left,” especially socialists, were skeptical about reducing human relations to economic transactions! No more! Let’s fucking embrace transactional relations in our most intimate lives now!

Unlike the caricature you will see below of my own position and that of others in the anti-prostitution camp (not anti-prostitute!), we do not oppose organizing some prostituted women for greater power against johns and pimps and procurers. We will support any half-measures that make these people less vulnerable, but abolition is the goalpost; and we have a much deeper analysis of prostitution than the one represented in this article. Deeper as an historical phenomenon, as a sociological phenomenon, as a capitalist phenomenon, as a racial phenomenon, and as an androcentric phenomenon.

This analysis, as you will see, contradicts and corrects the characterization of the problem of prostitution in Comrade Castillo’s article.

Unfortunately, many leftist men share a popular cultural belief in both the
(neoliberal/libertarian/capitalist) proprietary body, because they just haven’t studied it. They are philosophical ignoramuses, and so, the liberal proprietary body appears to them not as the historical artifact it is, but as a fact of nature. Some men on the left are academics and may have studied the liberal “proprietary body,” but the emergence of (individualistic) neo-Nietzschean gender studies as an academic orthodoxy has captured them, too. Their desire to belong, in the jungle of academia, has proven strong enough to turn their heads. Other men on the left gravitate toward the neoliberal approach, because in that echoing canyon of feminist-illiteracy, male sexual entitlement is protected and even valorized. When it comes to sex, the dudebros become libertarians. They want to maintain, as unrestricted as possible, universal male access to female bodies (See Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract). The latter is the least charitable account, and though I have seen it firsthand more than I like to admit, I will not attribute it to Castillo.

The article in question begins with a highly abbreviated description of two recent pieces of legislation — the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA). If objections to these two laws, recently passed, were the crux of the article, I would be writing about . . . I don’t know, backyard birding or pasta recipes. The laws are not what I take issue with here, but the inhering call to legalize the sexual prostitution of human beings.

I use this phrase — prostitution of — because the overwhelming majority of people (mostly women) who are exchanging sex with strangers for money are not the far rarer species who work on their own (and who are held up by prostitution apologists as representatives, or even paragons). They are women under the thumb of traffickers, pimps, and procurers as persons whose experiences, as women — abused, ignored, exploited, and addicted, left them at the mercy of traffickers, pimps, johns, and procurers.

Castillo is involved with labor organizing efforts aimed at what he calls “sex workers,” a term I do not use (nor do I refer to women [or others] as prostitutes, but as prostituted). “Sex work,” the term, is a bastardized amalgamation of libertarianism, post-feminism, and workerism — the latter that decrepit tendency of earlier Marxists to dismiss questions of race, gender, nationality, and even ecology, based on the assumed centrality of some vulgar account of class.

When we return to the actual Marx, however, we find that his original preoccupation was not with work per se, but with a far more personal concern — overcoming alienation. All three volumes of Capital are based on his attempt to understand and describe the causes of this alienation.

What is alienation?

For Marx, it was the fragmented expression of some essential aspect of one’s own humanity. Marx was trying to reveal an economic form of alienation, and his study subjects were factory workers. Human beings work — this is an aspect of human nature. We “make” our livelihoods with our backs and hands, our actualization. Marx showed how this essential human characteristic is converted into a source of misery, by separating the purpose and intent of work from the actual worker. Not just taking away that surplus value that constitutes profit, but taking away one of the most important satisfactions (work as actualization) of a “good life.” (Marx had Aristotelian tendencies.)

To alienate means to separate from; and this alienation of work has its corollary in the mind of the worker. S/he has to surrender X number of hours a day on work that is meaningless to her/him, even miserable and-or offensive, because that worker is captive within a social structure of dire dependency.

The worker has, by having her/his work alienated, been violated. Marx did not argue for a revolution to better compensate that alienation, that taking-away. He surely didn’t argue to commodify more spheres of human life (like sex). He argued (naively) for a revolution that would end this form of violence.

The goal of capitalism’s alienating structure is to satisfy the desires of capitalists to accumulate wealth. The goal of prostitution’s alienating structure is to satisfy the desires of men to use women (and children, and some men) for sex. A prostituted woman is compelled to rent her body to strangers for sex — to satisfy the desires of men, class irrespective, who believe they are entitled to sex, even and especially if they have to pay for it.

The product of labor — say, curtain rods — is alienated (separated) from my person in the factory where I work. I have no real connection to that work, like I would the deck I built at home or the picture I painted or my garden. The curtain rods are like thousands of little tyrants to me. I hate them. And yet the product of labor for the prostituted woman includes her very body. This is why so many prostituted women describe “work” as a dissociative state in which they feel separated from their own bodies.

That curtain rod does not belong to me.

My body does not “belong” to me.

“Sex workers” do not produce the product. They become the product. As Donna Hughes said, “Men create demand. Women are the supply.”

The “sex work” camp’s to reduction of prostitution to a labor-process conceals precisely the form of alienation with which feminists confronted Marxism — not in (pace MacKinnon) work being what is most taken-away, but in one’s own sexuality being what is most taken-away. This is different, because women’s sexuality is taken-away in many more spheres than work. It is taken-away one way or another everywhere women ubiquitously encounter predatory men, which is one reason that feminists were met with hostility on the left when they pointed this out. What was at stake was not only the workerist fallacy, but male sexual entitlement.

For very many women, the “oppressor” is not just the boss. He’s also that little tyrant at home who she can’t afford to divorce. He’s that stalker ex-boyfriend. He’s that prick who always has something sexually degrading to say. He’s the potential rapist. He’s that co-worker who can’t keep his goddamn hands to himself.

The #MeToo movement over the last couple of years is a direct response to
this kind of sexual power, and it cuts across race, class, and nationality. What has been remarkable about this movement is how many people can simultaneously support a movement whose subtext is that “sex is special, and so especially important,” and at the same time subscribe to the idea that prostitution is exactly like taking a job at Lowe’s or Burger King. Which is it? Special or trivial?

So when Comrade Castillo writes that “we [DSA] must establish ourselves as radical allies of all workers by coming out in full support of decriminalization of sex work . . . a feminist issue, a prison abolition issue, and a labor issue,” how does that square with the question of alienation, with the taking-away of women’s sexuality through commodification?

Many feminists (“not the fun kind”) advocate for the Nordic model (as do I) of criminalizing the buyer and not the seller. Prostitution is not alienated labor based on separation from a work product, but separation from the most intimate aspects of one’s own personhood.

“Consent,” you say! This is the liberal escape hatch when they’re caught in a contradiction. The way corrupt politicians grouse about legal technicalities when they’re busted. If intentionally decontextualized “consent” is the best you can do, you’re not a socialist, you’re a fucking Rawlsian, hiding behind a veil of ignorance, pretending humans (“individuals”) have no connection to others or history.

In addition to philosophical illiteracy, we’re back in that chasm of feminist illiteracy (see Pateman [linked above] on “slave contracts”). If DSA’s erroneous claims aren’t enough, consider this declaration in Castillo’s next paragraph:

“Patriarchy and capitalism do not exist separately. They are symbiotic. If we recognize that all wage labor under capitalism is inherently coercive, and thus all workers have their agency negated to some extent regardless of gender, then we should ask ourselves how our negative views on sex work versus other forms of wage labor might come from the patriarchal views that have surrounded most of us since birth.”

“Patriarchy and capitalism do not exist separately. They are symbiotic.” The editors even made this into a giant block quote on page nine, apparently with not a single person in the room pointing out that it’s patently untrue.

Symbiotic, yes. Inseparable . . . there is around 5,000 years of history that shows various patriarchies have been around a lot longer than the last 500 years. Patriarchy did not exist until capitalism? Patriarchy cannot exist within capitalism apart from the relation that is capital? The end of capitalism be the end of patriarchy?

Really?

Here is where the article goes completely off the rails: “ . . . we should ask ourselves how our negative views on sex work versus other forms of wage labor might come from the patriarchal views that have surrounded most of us since birth.”

Well, no. We shouldn’t. Because it’s a trick fucking question based on horse shit premises.

As just explained, feminist opposition to prostitution didn’t “come from patriarchal views,” but from rigorous, decades-long feminist analysis of the exploitation and abuse of women by men.

Too many on the “left” refuse to see sex per se as an issue is because sex-as-an-exercise-of-power threatens their liberal (“choice”) world view, if not their privilege. So they try to subsume the question of prostitution into a labor-process framework. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Castillo’s claim that opposition to legalization is motivated by archaic attitudes toward sex may apply to the conservative view that sex is a purely moral issue (surely it is a moral issue, even if conservative woman-blaming gets it wrong). Misdirection through misrepresentation of the feminist anti-prostitution argument. The most charitable reason for this dismissal of the feminist case against prostitution with a response appropriate to the conservative one would be that he just didn’t know any better. But, then, he follows up with a crude and deceptive characterization of the feminist argument itself.

“On the one side,” he says, “are those who say it is useless to distinguish between ‘voluntary’ sex work and ‘coercive’ sex work, as all instances of selling and buying sex are coercive because of the balance of power caused by patriarchy. The other side [his side] responds that is inherently anti-feminist to erase the agency of people who engage in sex work of their own free will.”

(Progressive linguistic mystification has really put me off the terms “agency,” “identity,” “authenticity,” and “erasure.”)

He admits that there is a schism on the left about this issue; but his caricature of the opposing view at least does note that (other people believe) power and sex are inextricable. And for the record, not a single person I have ever talked to or read on this has suggested that there is no difference between an independent escort and a woman working the street. Ever. What we are saying is that the former is a tiny minority, and not representative of the phenomenon of prostitution.

His response to the straw woman he’s constructed, asking about how male power contextualizes women’s lives and choices, is . . . drum roll please . . . agency.

“The other side responds [Castillo’s side] that it is inherently anti-feminist to erase the agency of people who engage in sex work of their own free will.”

Dude, if it’s real “agency,” it can’t be “erased” by a difference of opinion.

“Agency” is almost a mystical term among pop-post-constructivists and post-feminists, and closely related to a media product called “power femininity.” Agency is so evocative, giving one the aspect of some wizened Continental philosopher. Agency, all my snark aside, is nothing more or less than being able to choose. By itself, apart from context, it’s a meaningless idea, because as the existentialists drearily pointed out, one always has this kind of “freedom,” even if the only choice one can make is suicide. It’s hardly something one can “erase” . . . or celebrate except for some of its fruits.

As an acolyte of De Certeau, I do celebrate the ability of people who are relatively powerless to make subversive choices; but that’s a far cry from the re-privatization of political issues — which is exactly what this whole “sex-positive,” neoliberal approach to the human catastrophe of prostitution accomplishes.

A person on Death Row exercises agency when s/he chooses a last meal. The question has never been about agency [a liberal/pop-post-constructivist red herring] but sustained structural power that puts pretty substantial limitations on people’s “agency” prior to the amnesiac liberal moment of telescopic exchange (consent). This is the ultimate sleight of hand at the heart of liberal philosophy. Here is our moment of exchange where sexual gratification goes one way and money goes the other. Nothing exists before or after.

From afar, the liberal moral universe is strangely everywhere and nowhere, and the liberal “individual” is everyone and no one. Two people, we see them down along through our telescope, because we are focusing here (and excluding everything else) . . . each is giving something in return for something. This is the transactional contractarian instant, divorced, as it were, from its own history and context.

Through this lens, the “individual” (see how strangely ahistorical this being is, no particularity of experience, no membership in any groups, sexless, ageless, colorless) times two. Not much to see down this telescope . . . and this is liberal “equality.” One equals one. Homo economicus is back, now dressed up as a socialist “agent.” What does the telescope exclude? Sustained, historically and materially constituted, structural power (where in the world have we heard this before!?).

Actual, enfleshed creatures making an actual exchange in the actual material/spatiotemporal/semiotic world, inevitably have a mountain of dissimilarities. Some of these dissimilarities constitute sustained structural power (gender, race, class, nationality, etc.). When that white-collar john hands the money over and dictates what sex acts he wants to perform on an abused eighteen-year-old heroin addict, and she agrees, there are horrific disparities of power on display, but — here it is again, that liberal sleight of hand — those power differentials are invisible to the law. “Consent.”

This is how we can claim a formal equality between me and Bill Gates — the laws apply to us equally — but Bill and I will remain on a power gradient where he is on one end and I am much nearer the other. This also allows us to think of this exchange as an exchange — when it is the construction of a relationship in which this affluent man can have sexual access to the body of an eighteen-year-old heroin addict. Liberal law conceals actual inequality behind a veil of formal equality, even as it transforms a power-inflected relationship into the bloodless, mechanical, morally-irrelevant instant of exchange.

“The root question of an abolitionist approach to prostitution,” wrote my late friend Kathy Miriam, “is not whether women ‘choose’ prostitution or not, but why men have the right to ‘demand that women’s bodies are sold as commodities in the capitalist market.’”

There is an apocryphal story around Hollywood about Jack Nicholson, wherein he said “I don’t pay hookers to come to the house, I pay them to leave.” In the neoliberal/libertarian world, prostitution no longer even triggers an enquiry into the misogyny that underwrites much male sex, most commercial sex, and nearly all pornographic sex. Because, censorship. Because, agency. Because, choice.

In my view, as a socialist of long standing, if there is one thing essential for any socialist to understand, it’s how liberal law protects power by dividing the world into two spheres: public and private. This division is epitomized by “castle doctrine” in liberal law. “A man’s home is his castle.” Inside it, until relatively recently, this man ruled over his own little kingdom of wife and children, with the most minimal legal oversight. The gist is, what is “private” is invisible to the eyes of the law.

Prostitution is not on par with a job; it’s an expression of historically constituted sexual hierarchy. Does a wife who fears divorce but hates her husband consent when she has sex with him to avoid his anger or abandonment? Surely, we see this question with enough nuance to surpasses the anemic liberal legal standard of “consent.” What would you say to your friend if she told you this?

But when the same survival dynamic underwrites prostitution, are we to immediately jump out of the ring where we struggle against oppressive sexual hierarchies and position ourselves alongside liberals by shifting the issue from one of (alienating) socio-sexual power to labor-process? If alienation is not your target, what you’re calling for is not “socialism.” It’s bog-standard technocratic liberalism.

The public sphere is visible to the law, the private sphere — to the extent feasible — is invisible to the law. Works for capitalism and male entitlement equally well. Private choices embody “freedom,” even the freedom to alienate one’s own body. It’s about contract, and property. Before a thing can be reduced to a commodity, it has to be claimed as a property — a possession.

The liberal idea of autonomy derives directly from this conceit: the proprietary body. I “own” “my” body — subject/object. You can get a bit dizzy trying to get your head around it. How can I be a body and have a body at the same time? Jolt!

Would a socialist quote John Locke with anything except irony?

Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.

— John Locke, “Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration,” 2.25

“. . . a property in his own person . . .”

“With respect to prostitution, “continues Dr. Miriam, “the central political fiction of prostitution-as-an-exchange is the story that through the prostitution contract, a woman sells ‘sexual services’ for money, as if sexuality were not actually embodied, as if there existed a subject who, magically, was capable of separating her physical/sexual capacities from her ‘self.’ This ‘conjuring trick’ (to use Pateman’s phrase) called ‘sexual services’ obscures the real meaning of prostitution as ‘an institution which allows certain powers of command over one person’s body to be exercised by another.’”

Welcome to the proprietary body, a sensible machine owned by a liberal ghost.

Contract, the proprietary body, and the public-private dichotomy are the cornerstones of (neo)liberal philosophy. Together they constitute a “model of agency . . . that both presupposes and conceals the social relations of domination that obtain for prostitution.” (Miriam)

Yes, in that sense, the alienable body/self is also presupposed in the labor contract; but the progressive commodification of every aspect of our lives that these phenomena buttress is an aspect of capitalist expansion. In prostitution, there is this, but also another relation of domination — apart from unequal signatories to the capitalist contract — and that is male social hegemony, a relation of power not based on money, but sex. (Yes, it still exists apart from the upper classes, where it’s been eroded or concealed within gender ideology.)

Contract establishes a “civil” society that exists exclusively in that public sphere. The public sphere is politically relevant; and the private is to one degree or another immunized against political intervention, and counted as irrelevant to public/political discourse. Prior to feminist intervention, the public was a sphere of activity where men ruled fraternally; and in the private sphere, men ruled individually.

“Sex-work,” seen economistically as it is in Castillo’s article, is tantamount to supporting male entitlement by pretending it doesn’t exist (privatizing) in order to force it into the Procrustean bed of the contract (public). The contract favors the powerful; it was their invention. So does the contractual sex-work hermeneutic. It simultaneously conceals and reproduces the forms of power that obtained prior to the (neo)liberal, amnesiac instance of exchange that makes male hegemony and entitlement disappear in the analysis. (This is only descriptive, we’ll note again, for a small minority of prostituted people, who are generally subjected to violent or potentially violent coercion every single day.)

Feminists have produced many of the best analyses of this public-private dichotomy, because feminist critique focuses on domination that happens apart from the public, political gaze. The domination of women who have been excluded from the public sphere except as consumers, happens most often in the intimate settings of the private sphere. This is what feminists meant when they said, “The personal is the political.” (Not that your feelings are political, ffs.)

The same thing can be paraphrased as “the private is the political,” political referring here to issues of social power (of the polis).

In the contractarian origin myths, which are Western male myths, there were no political subjects who were not adult white men. The private realm of the husband-headed nuclear family is where the women and children can be hidden from public view and politics. Rousseau admitted of these “prior social relations” related to sex in his origin myth, highlighting the public-private split in an explicitly gendered way. “The education of women,” he wrote, “should always be relative to that of men. To please, to be useful to us, to make us love and esteem them, to educate us when young, to take care of us when grown up, to advise, to console us, to render our lives easy and agreeable; these are the duties of women at all times, and what they should be taught in their infancy.”

Vive la révolution!

In addition to the economistic interpretation by “sex work” advocates, there is an even more neoliberal pretense of something called “empowerment.” Kathy Miriam adopts “Charles Taylor’s term ‘expressivist’ to refer to a specific heritage of Western Romanticist thought that defines individual freedom in terms of a ‘poeisis,’ an activity of self-creation.” Freedom is being left alone. This is bedrock liberalism. “Empowerment” feminism, or more tellingly, “power femininity” (there the pre-second-wave gender binary re-rears its head!), is bedrock individualism. Empowerment is self-fulfillment, getting what you want. If there is one thing that has always been anathema to liberal philosophy, it is restraint. It makes four-year-olds of us all: the “mine, more, now” ethos.

Rosalind Gill has something to say about this “empowerment.”

“Notions of choice,” she notes, “of ‘being oneself’,

and ‘pleasing oneself’ are central to the postfeminist sensibility that suffuses contemporary Western media culture. They resonate powerfully with the emphasis upon empowerment and taking control that can be seen in talk shows, advertising and makeover shows. A grammar of individualism underpins all these — such that even experiences of racism or homophobia or domestic violence are framed in exclusively personal terms in a way that turns the idea of the personal as political on its head. Lois McNay has called this the deliberate ‘reprivatisation’ of issues that have only relatively recently become politicized.

Michele Lazar weighs in, too:

“Postfeminist [cultural production] suggests that patriarchal ideologies of gender in terms of women’s powerlessness and oppression are outdated. Instead, this is fast becoming a women’s world, in which relations of power are shifting in favour of women. Such representations, however, far from supporting the feminist cause, are quite detrimental to it. Feminists’ concern for women’s empowerment is appropriated and recontextualized by [media], evacuating it of its political content and instead infusing meanings quite antithetical to feminism . . . Structurally, the gender order remains dualistic and hierarchical, but the players have been switched. There appears to be at work a perverse sense of equality — if women traditionally have been the subordinated group, and in the media sexually objectified, it is a sign of social progress to turn the tables on men along similar lines. This is hardly the kind of gender order restructuring envisaged by feminists of any persuasion.”

Kathy Miriam:

The sex worker as postmodern text [which tumbles back into a neoliberal political frame] issues from an elite vantage point, the abstract intellectual projecting its own version of abstract individuality onto prostitutes in general, the vast majority of whom lack a fraction of the mobility enjoyed by the privileged group who craft the theory.

Relative privilege.

Yes, women make real “choices” in deciding to exchange sex for money. No one is contesting that here. What is at issue is not “choice” [the neoliberal red herring], but the intentional ignorance of the (neo)liberal standpoint. Deploying choice (even as “agency”) is a deception, what magicians call misdirection, the psychoactive mystification of “the reality that it is men’s demand that makes prostitution intelligible and legitimate as a means of survival for women in the first place.”

Using the example of a comparatively privileged high-end escort who has “chosen” prostitution in some neo-Nietzschean pursuit of authenticity through “transgression” (another term pop-post-structuralists have ruined) is to intentionally, using a compositional fallacy, misrepresent the reality of prostitution more generally as a social phenomenon—highly racialized “physical violence, economic exploitation, social isolation, verbal abuse, threats and intimidation, physical violence, sexual assault, and captivity.” It takes a blinding form of “privilege” (yet another word they’ve fucked up through diffusion) to interpret that as empowerment . . . or even employment.

The experiences of a woman who prostituted primarily in strip clubs, but also in massage, escort and street prostitution, are typical. In strip club prostitution, she was sexually harassed and assaulted. Stripping required her to smilingly accommodate customers’ verbal abuse. Customers grabbed and pinched her legs, arms, breasts, buttocks and crotch, sometimes resulting in bruises and scratches. Customers squeezed her breasts until she was in severe pain, and they humiliated her by ejaculating on her face. Customers and pimps physically brutalized her. She was severely bruised from beatings and frequently had black eyes. Pimps pulled her hair as a means of control and torture. She was repeatedly beaten on the head with closed fists, sometimes resulting in unconsciousness. From these beatings, her eardrum was damaged, and her jaw was dislocated and remains so many years later. She was cut with knives. She was burned with cigarettes by customers who smoked while raping her. She was gang-raped and she was also raped individually by at least 20 men at different times in her life. These rapes by johns and pimps sometimes resulted in internal bleeding. “Yet this woman described the psychological damage of prostitution as far worse than the physical violence. She explained that prostitution ‘is internally damaging. You become in your own mind what these people do and say with you.”

— Melissa Farley, Psychiatric Times

This is “work”?

The actual exchange of money for sex, that amnesiac instant, is preceded by a history and encapsulated within a larger socio-sexual structure of which this exchange is but a final expression, and one that does not end when the exchange does, at least not for the prostituted woman.

There is a difference between productive labor and the commodification of a body, as a body, for some strange man to stick his dick into. Feminism is a movement against male entitlement, just as socialism is a movement against capitalist entitlement. They are similar in their accounts of domination-subjugation, but they are about qualitatively different things. By converting the struggle against male entitlement into a struggle against capitalist entitlement, what gets rescued is male entitlement.

Refusal to acknowledge the structural dominance of men in addressing the question of prostitution is matched by a similar refusal to acknowledge race. The prostitution debate, framed in (neo)liberal/libertarian terms, has not only effaced those gendered domination structures that preface the phenomenon of prostitution, they have effaced the racialized structures that are manifest in prostitution and force women who are also racial subalterns into prostitution disproportionately.

They do NOT, on the whole, see this as a labor issue.

Cheryl Nelson Butler, writing for the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, citing feminist Catharine MacKinnon, who is anti-prostitution, writes, “MacKinnon’s . . . focus has been on challenging structural oppression and recognizing that, in the context of prostitution, this structural oppression of women manifests itself as, and intersects with, racial subordination.”

Butler critically supports radical feminists on this account, as opposed to the liberal/libertarian approach, because historians and theorists of “race” are likewise concerned with structures (nested, self-organized, socioeconomic “habits”) of domination, as opposed to decontextualized arguments about personal choice. Women belonging to racial lower castes, or to racial groups who are disproportionally poor, are associated with prostitution through a cultural lens of stereotypes about racially-othered women; but the libertarian account (Castillo’s) can make no reference to the sexual-stereotypes about black women, for example, because that would disrupt the unspoken subtext of the neoliberal argument that Castillo and others have made: that sex per se can transcend the cosmos, innocent of power through the magical mojo of “choice.”

Sex, in a society still stratified around sex, cannot be disentangled from power, nor the structures of power. Sex, and prostitution, are imbricated in a sexual power structure that interacts with class and money, but they are utterly unintelligible without a specific account of sexual hierarchies, which cannot be reduced to class. Class analysis does not have some special dispensation to guide feminism’s critical enquiries, even though it has to be incorporated with it to tell a more complete truth. Which is to say, the reduction of women and children’s sexual exploitation to an abstracted labor-process is, in addition to being both inaccurate and offensive, highly presumptuous.

Libertarians and neoliberals argue from exception. They have no use for trends or tendencies, because a preponderance of evidence might run contrary to their hyper-individualistic ideology. When confronted with poverty statistics, for example, and racial demographics, which show how African America is still over-represented in negative social indices, libertarians/neoliberals will cite Oprah as the super-rich exception. Their arguments and rebuttals are exceptional, not tendential, because they’re arguing in bad faith. They’re not primarily concerned with getting at the truth, because the truth to them is a set of ironclad and highly abstracted principles (there’s the contradiction, right there); they’re concerned with defending the principles themselves, even when those principles in action entail horrific collateral damage.

Using the example of a few sexual dilettantes, and the tiny handful of women who have “chosen” to exchange sex for money, as representative of women who are prostituted generally is exactly this kind of libertarian gambit. The vast majority of women, in the US and abroad, who are exchanging sex with strangers for money, are not “power feminists” who are reveling in their own “agency,” they are victims of childhood sexual abuse, childhood neglect, sexual abuse more generally, drug addiction resulting from self-medication, and often under the direct power of violent men. Representing that reality with a stylized sample of the few who constitute this exception makes collateral damage of the vast majority who are living with a daily diet of humiliation, degradation, addiction, and abuse. A union card won’t stop a violent john.

A predominant form of bad faith argument in politics is when a policy campaign becomes the tail that wags the critical dog. Let me compare two forms of this bad faith — one on abortion and this one being made about prostitution — since both arguments revolve around “choice.”

I can already hear chair-scooting and throat-clearing . . . is he about to say something against reproductive choice? In advance, no and yes. No, I am not going to argue for the criminalization of abortion. Yes, I am going to argue that reducing it to a simple, deracinated “choice” is a politically expedient minimization that obscures the actual complexity of the issue of abortion.

We take sides on the argument about policy, and then move to advance that position tactically (as opposed to ethically and rationally) through the political terrain by accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative. We give selective accounts, in other words, that shore up support for our side and erode support for the other side. Black and Third World feminists will tell you that the abortion debate treats them as if they don’t exist, framing the whole debate from the standpoint of more affluent, “first-world” women. “Reproductive freedom” in African America, for example, calls up abortion, forced, or coerced, as a crime committed against one’s people, alongside forced sterilizations and other eugenic measures. The pro-choicer does not want to publish about women whose husbands and boyfriend pressured them to have an abortion (very common); and the pro-lifer does not want to publish materials that show how dangerous are underground abortions or about the myriad conditions in a woman’s life that would make her feel she had to have an abortion (there is a pro-life offshoot that is addressing “abortion-reduction” now, but they are marginalized by absolutist conservatives and liberals).

It’s remarkable that “my body, my choice” — the pro-choice mantra — has now been taken up by men in support of prostitution. That proprietary body carries within it a tapeworm of contradiction.

The same applies to the sex-work libertarians . . . The “sex-work” liberals’ issue (this was what provoked Castillo’s article) is that the law might allow internet censorship, in this case of anonymous sex ads online. The no- censorship line (and I have deep reservations about censorship,including the kind of online mob censorship exercised by woke-gnostics and privatized censorship of media platforms), as demonstrated in Castillo’s article, is the lodestar of his prostitution legalization argument. A power analysis of men vis-à-vis women — which forms the core of the argument for the Nordic model in law, policies that address the core causes of prostitution, and of sex-critical scholarship — is glaringly absent. Power analysis often enough effaces abstract “principles.” The abstract principle of “free speech,” a libertarian shibboleth, and “choice,” reduce the whole question to the abstract individual — Homo economicus — that is the cornerstone of capitalist ideology. Calling this socialism or feminism is frankly appalling.

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FOOTNOTE: Angel Castillo also misrepresented the outcomes of the Nordic model. Within fifteen years of implementation in Sweden, prostitution dropped substantially, prosecutions (of johns) dropped by half, and trafficking dramatically declined. The law was passed first in Sweden (ergo, the term “Nordic model”).

FOOTNOTE: When I say liberal-patriarchal, or modern-patriarchal, I am implicitly denying such a thing as The Patriarchy—another fallacy. Even if one begins by defining “patriarchy” as male social dominance, there are many fields of social practice, and many forms of dominance, which exist in larger and highly variable contexts. Even within the epochs of modernity (late fifteenth century on) and liberalism (seventeenth century on), gender (defined as complementarily distinctive tools, dress, habits, attitudes, speech, etc. for men and women) has differed between various cultures, classes, and communities. Feminism, as movement and academic practice, emerged during and in response to the liberal epoch, and thereby adopted its language and epistemes. Later instantiations (Marxist feminism, e.g.) likewise adopted the epistemic vocabularies of their “modifiers.” The abstraction “patriarchy,” then, conceals more than it reveals.