"Selling your body" and "buying consent"

[u/i_am_cynosura]

I ended up writing an essay-length response to an earlier thread in the other feminism subreddit and this is an excerpt I wanted to share:

The term “you cannot buy consent” is closely related to the deeply misogynistic notion that sex workers “sell their bodies”. If selling sexual services amounts to selling your body, then providing sexual services for free (i.e. having sex) would amount to “giving away your body for free”, and providing sexual services to your husband would amount to being owned by your husband. I should not have to explain why the latter two propositions are deeply unfeminist – and they are inherently connected to the first proposition. I strongly doubt that the phrase “selling your body” even originated in feminist theory, and yet somehow it has seen widespread adoption by anti-sex work activists. Somehow, in their haste to criticize “libfems” and “choice feminists”, the supposedly radical wing of feminism wholeheartedly adopted the traditional, patriarchal notion that a woman is possessed by the men she has sex with.

Moreover, I find the phrase “selling bodies” to be very revealing about the mindset of anti-sex work activists. There’s a perverse elegance and efficiency to this language: in a few words, it obscures the fact that sex workers are laborers in the same way that a non-erotic massage therapist or dancer is a laborer. It also renders the sex worker a victim of a theft or violation to their body, suggesting that their entire corpus no longer belongs to them. Finally, and perhaps worst of all, the phrase is objectifying to sex workers in the Nussbaumian sense – instrumentalizing, denying autonomy, rendering inert, fungible, violable, owned, and lacking subjectivity. She is a body, not a person – no more than a piece of meat, as sex workers have so eloquently been described by some feminists.

Whether we’re talking about “buying consent” or “selling bodies”, it amounts to the same thing – the sex worker isn’t allowed to make her own decisions about her body and must be diverted from this career path. Rendered into this state by anti-sex work activists – by supposed feminists in some cases, the sex worker cannot be trusted to know what is best for her; she should simply trust that her feminist sisters have her best interest in mind when they help enact policies that make landlords dump her, doctors deny her service, and police hound her every step and rape her during “wellness checks”. And if she doesn’t like it she can simply find a better job – it’s famously easy to switch careers as a former sex worker!

It's really too bad Magdalene Laundries isn't hiring these days, I've heard their working conditions are to die for!

I feel that in wanting to oppose the harms present in the sex industry, many feminists have not only written off living, breathing sex workers as acceptable collateral damage, but have quietly accepted very traditional views on women as a part of this process. And this only touches on a common piece of rhetoric - I could go on about the other deeply problematic elements of the anti-sex work movement, such as their collusion with conservative politicians and cops and how these policies disproportionately affect Black, Indigenous, and migrant women.

[u/quiloxan1989]

Anti sw, but pro sw-er.

There is definitely the idea of "marriage is an acceptable form of prostitution" present in the material I have read, so it isn't a far-fetched idea that women are selling themselves in even domestic spheres.

Give sw-ers a safe passage out of the industry while regulating, but I do make sure that I always say I am phasing out the industry.

I only accept the ending of sw when there is a total empowerment of women to ensure their choices are authentic (I genuinely believe that no one would go into this industry if given proper skills and we didn't fund sw the way we do), which really can happen only for the ending of capitalism.

Edit: I think, from your writing, that being a sw-er is an "authentic choice."

I do not think that it is, since it is targeted towards women and the most marginalized, in the same ways that the poor are made to mine until they are fired, devastating towns that are built around mining.

[u/i_am_cynosura → u/quiloxan1989]

I feel that "anti sw, pro swer" is the 4th wave equivalent of "hate the sin, love the sinner" - I don't doubt that you at least theoretically care for the well-being of sex workers, but broadly opposing the industry without caveats means opposing a sex worker's means to feed, clothe, shelter, and provide medical care for herself and her loved ones. Indeed, I find the comparison between homphobic conservatives apt as people who say this are fine with gays and sex workers as people - provided they're not engaging in the stigmatized sexual activity.

[u/quiloxan1989 → u/i_am_cynosura]

You aren't reading the points I made.

Everything you have said, I am already in support of.

Also, you necessitate sw for economic reasons, hence why I have said capitalism needs to be ended as well.

Your advocacy is tantamount to uplifting sexual slavery.

I'm not in support of this, and I think it needs to be revisited.

[u/i_am_cynosura → u/quiloxan1989]

I'll be sure to let these "slaves" know what you think of them the next time I have them over for coffee.

[u/quiloxan1989 → u/i_am_cynosura]

No problem.

Make sure to say all of my points.