"SEX WORK IS WORK" - A LONG READ
For a few centuries now the world has had an increasing problem. That problem is work. It should be well known that before the industrial age the working landscape was entirely different to what it is today. There was a lot more subsistence. There was, until the prelude to capitalism, a lot more commons. People could survive by having little and doing little. But then capitalism came, told everybody they needed a job (when what was actually true was that already rich people with ideas for getting richer needed workers) and started providing them with lots of crap they didn’t need but which it told them they had to have. Thus began the death spiral of capitalism which traps people into work, uses them up, spits them out, and exploits them like all the other natural resources it uses to generate its often crappy products. This pathway, all about profits for a few, leads only to eventual climate disaster and treads a path of constant human misery to get there. But never mind, a few billionaires have yachts and private jets so it was all worth it.
Now I have nothing against sex workers anymore than I have anything against other kinds of workers. All are equally trapped into a system which forces them to sell their bodies and attention for a price. Few are they who escape this cage. Everybody, so we are told, has to do something to live. So I imagine sex workers, like any workers, are rats in a trap. The issue for me is that the claim is often made “sex work is work” – and I wonder what this means and implies. The charitable narrative is that it is a call for sex workers to have the same rights and protections as any other kind of worker, rights and protections which have always had to be fought for on behalf of any kind of worker and which are often under threat (as in the case of companies like Amazon or workers in the so-called “gig-economy”). This slogan is in my head at the moment, in fact, because I saw a story about Belgian sex workers winning some rights. As far as it goes, that’s all good.
But, to me, the slogan “sex work is work” is as much a problem as a statement of fact or a call for rights and protections. This is not a problem because of the sex – about which I am far more liberal than many – but because of the work. That sex work “is work” is exactly my problem in fact. It is a problem because “work” is a problem in the political space I come from which is that of anarchy. “Work” is the chain by which we are enslaved and don’t let the fact that you are thrown a few crumbs from the table for your work kid you into the idea that work is anything other than slavery. See how the society you live in treats those who can’t or won’t work for references on that. Not just bosses or billionaires will happily watch people starve in the streets, millions of “workers” will too. All have bought (or been plugged) into a system of economic relationships and morality which teaches that you don’t deserve anything unless you work. Do you realise how unnatural that mentality is? Only a few thousand years ago “work” in its entirety was an unknown concept – and people survived. The “job” is basically an invention of the Industrial Revolution and so practically brand new to human thought. Don’t be kidded into thinking this is all normal and natural when its artificial and enforced. Our relations and our existences don’t have to be carried out this way and they only are because force is being applied to make it so. “Work” is a coercion.
This remains true even if you are working for yourself, of course, because your existence is not just based on what you do. Its also based on what system of economic relationships you find yourself in. In a system where doing each other favours was good enough no one would need money. Each would just do another a favour and all would be smoothed over to everyone’s satisfaction. Anthropologists talk of systems based on gift giving or on forms of communist living. There are even systems where the economy is a sexual economy in that the nookie is shared around far more liberally than in places where sex is imagined restricted to marriage partners, etc. In this respect, the idea that sex might be a saleable commodity is both a novelty and a particularity. We might examine this further for I would find it hard to believe that many people would imagine that sex is an activity human beings do which is just like any other. My point of dispute here is not what people may or may not do with their sexuality. It is with examining the effects of imagining it is a saleable commodity (which is itself only a subset of the imaginary which imagines ANYTHING is a saleable commodity). Why would anyone imagine to BUY AND SELL sex?
My critique here is of CAPITALISM which imagines that ANYTHING can be bought and sold. It certainly has absolutely no qualms about selling human bodies, about forcing them into contractual obligations and about kicking them to the curb if they don’t play along. I would ask here that we don’t just simply accept this because, as someone coming from anarchy, I ask what promotes human freedom – and capitalism does not. As an imposed and forced system of relations, it promotes human slavery, human exploitation, coercion of humans (and animals and natural resources more generally). If anyone had a magic wand to bring freedom to our human communities and to our planetary ecosystems they would start by making capitalism disappear. So the issue with capitalism is what comes along with the acceptance of it and its practices. These are transformative. They take what was once thought of and related to in one way and they turn it into something thought of and related to in another way, the commercial way, the way of profit and loss, the way of exploitation. Capitalism is basically the exploitation and maximisation of a resource for private gain. It is what creates vast inequality in society, something capitalism largely ignores because it is the consequence of it.
This particularly impacts sex capitalism (which is what sex work is) if you think about it. Let’s ask a simple question: what is sex for? (Please note again that the issue here is not about what someone may or may not do with their sexuality. They may, if we are of an anarchistic mind, do with it as they wish. The issue for me in this piece, however, is if all things they could do with it are simply the same in consequential terms.) There might be some different answers given here. A conservative might say sex is for procreation (and so imagine it entirely heterosexually). A libertine might say sex is for fun. A capitalist might say it is for making profit. I would say it is for building caring human relationships as the basis of an anarchist politics. I have written about this, at some length, in one of my books called BLACK DOG and it is why the sex work example of work stands out to me particularly as an example. For if we imagine sex to be a means to a certain sort of diverse, interactive, sexually free and positive society, what one anthropologist, Camilla Power of University College London’s “Radical Anthropology” group calls “what made us human in the first place”, but, instead, sex is simply a commodity, something else you can buy or sell to extract profit much like a tin of beans, then there you have a total clash of values and ways of life. The sex example is more on the nose for me because sexuality itself is imagined by me in an alternative and intimate way which, in my imaginary at least (informed by anthropological research into more communally sexual communities which use(d) sex as a community bonding practice), clashes with the capitalist view of sex. So I am critiquing and criticising the imaginary of sex here and not sex workers themselves who, like any worker, are coerced people anyway – for we exist in a coercive system and situation.
It has not passed me by, however, that if some people (on “the Left”) even suspect that you might be saying something bad about sex work or sex workers then you must be some kind of sex worker hater or “swerf”. (I am neither “sex worker exclusionary” nor a “radical feminist” for the record.) For some reason, these people seem to take the attitude that sex workers are, in some sense, made uncriticisable because they are sex workers. Are sex workers made holy and untouchable by their sex work? I find this attitude bizarre and illogical. Are shop workers beyond criticism? Are factory workers? Are bus drivers, school teachers or chimney sweeps? Then why are sex workers? My issue here is one of seeing capitalism as an enemy, something to be destroyed and defeated (before it is we, including all those who work, who are defeated by it instead). Thus, I attack the capitalist system directly – which includes sex capitalism. So I conclude there can be asshole sex capitalists just like any other kind of capitalist. (Indeed, a check on social media reveals that LOTS of sex workers seem to support Donald Trump! This, of course, is not to besmirch all of them.)
So I agree with my mentor in anarchism, Emma Goldman, when she writes in her 1896 essay “Anarchy and The Sex Question” about the issue of women’s place in society. The fault is with the society, not the sex workers. Describing a vast contrast of wealth of rich and poor, she writes: “Look at these two startling contrasts, you moralists and philanthropists, and tell me who is to be blamed for it! Those who are driven to prostitution, whether legal or otherwise, or those who drive their victims to such demoralisation? The cause lies not in prostitution, but in society itself, in the system of inequality of private property and in the State and Church. In the system of legalized theft, murder and violation of the innocent women and helpless children.” Goldman’s view in this essay is that “prostitution” (something she says “disgraces humanity”) – which we may broaden today into sex work generally – is a phenomenon of its circumstances. If you force people into poverty and even desperation then they will do whatever it takes, no matter how extreme or unwise, to get out of it. Goldman, a vociferous free love advocate, was of the mind that sex work was less than ideal, a product of economic circumstances. She spoke and wrote about the day in which, in a freer and more equal society, it would be entirely unnecessary. But that is only because she spoke and wrote about the day when capitalist exploitation would just be a scary story of the past told to frighten children. Her view, as mine, is that capitalist relations should be remade and remade better.
Here is the lesson Goldman gives. It is that the way out of capitalism, and so out of its death grip, is not by embracing it, accepting it and simply normalising it. It is by resisting it, refusing it, subverting it and acting to destroy it. This applies to ALL WORK. It makes us question, and condemn, work itself. Or, at least, it should.
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