The sex work sham: Coronavirus has highlighted the rank hypocrisy of sex trade-apologist Leftists
By: Tom Farr
Tags: Prostitution, Sex Work, Socialism, Feminism, Radical Feminism

Stepping outside of the context of Covid-19 for a (lengthy) moment, the crux of this issue is not that Leftist sex trade apologists are somehow forming this opinion in a vacuum — as mentioned, there is myriad press coverage talking about the supposed benefits of allowing unhindered sexual access to the inside of a woman’s body — rather, this ideology is wrong on two fronts: prostitution should not be considered work in theoretical terms, and the reality of prostitution apologism proves it does not work in practice irrespective of whether it is considered “work” or not.

This argument is particularly egregious in its current form as advanced by Twitter socialists/Marxists/”I’m literally a communist(s)” (delete according to relevant Twitter bio) where on the one hand, there have been campaigns and protests to end the relentless free market capitalism that has gutted our society and left little protection for the most vulnerable amongst us; on the other, there has been an indefatigable crusade to glorify and expand a literal marketplace of human bodies there to provide sexual gratification for what is almost always a man.

Seize the means of production? I guess?

As Julie Bindel, author of The Pimping of Prostitution and campaigner against male violence against women tells me:

The sex trade, and prostitution specifically, is the starkest example imaginable of Leftist hypocrisy. Whilst genuine socialists or even soft centrists have a critique of uber capitalism, many will stop short at condemning poor and otherwise vulnerable women and girls having their bodies mined by rich exploiters for their own greedy and selfish benefit. Prostitution represents the interface between the worst excesses of patriarchy and capitalism.

Dealing with the first issue, on whether “sex work” can or should be considered “work”. The argument is formulated on the premise that by refusing to recognise “sex work” as “work” (or to put it another way, labour), then it prevents those within prostitution from receiving the protections afforded to recognised workers within the capitalist mode of production.

Discussions regarding socialist conceptions of work is a complicated issue, and one which has been debated for many years, but it is necessary to analyse this very carefully to put to rest the claim that “sex work is work”.

The first stop on this carousel of misery has to be the question: “what do you mean by sex work?” The phrase “sex work” has become so ubiquitous as to be totally meaningless. Everybody from the woman enslaved by a pimp, to the student who sells pictures of her body parts online with zero physical contact with the purchaser (which, by the way, is not devoid of risk or damaging consequences), to the “high-class escort”, to the strip club performer and all in-between are concertina’d down into a monolith of “sex worker”.

This renders the very real concrete differences between the reality of these situations as totally meaningless, and is indicative of the lumping together of vast swathes of women who have completely different relationships to this alleged work. (To preface, this section will borrow heavily from this superb Struggle Sessions essay, which is highly recommended.)

Take for instance the woman who performs in a strip club. Common “progressive” parlance would dictate that this woman is a sex worker. But this fundamentally misunderstands the concept of work, and the proletarian relation to it within the capitalist mode of production.

The majority of women that work in strip clubs in the UK are self-employed, which immediately distinguishes them from the proletarian who is exploited by a capitalist owner for their labour power, with the goal of extracting surplus value (which would ultimately result in profit). These individuals would be paid a wage for their labour power; the strip performer is not. The same goes for people who “cam”, and any other situation in which somebody earns money for a sexual performance after a third party takes a hosting cut.

Further, these performative types of “sex work” differentiate themselves from prostitution by their very nature. You can tell that even in common understanding, stripping and prostitution are not the same thing because strip clubs go to great lengths to make sex and sexual contact “against the rules” (not that this means prostitution does not occur within strip clubs, of course). While ironically the common thread between the above and non-pimp related prostitution is that none of them constitute work, they are still very much differentiated by the nature of what each circumstance entails.

These situations do not constitute work in the sense that these people are exploited by a capitalist employer as wage labourers, yet somehow they all constitute a monolithic grouping of “sex worker”. These women have been egregiously grouped together under the umbrella of “(sex) worker” by so-called socialists because, and this is the crux of the issue, they do something for money. This is not what is meant by a socialist conception of work.

Further to this, the condensing of all who do something for money that has the common thread of “sexuality” running through it ignores the very distinct class-differences within prostitution specifically. For example, the women who are controlled by pimps — which in the United States for example make up the majority of women in prostitution — are in no way workers. As the above Struggle Sessions essay points out, pimp-controlled prostitution is more akin to slavery than anything else. The woman is both controlled and effectively owned by the pimp, who oversees every aspect of her existence. The idea of applying “workers’ rights” to a woman who is literally owned by a man who profits off repeatedly selling her body is as grotesque as it is laughably bourgeois. Would these pimp-owned women band together to negotiate better terms of their enslavement? Would they negotiate a contract that stipulates when and where the prolific physical violence and abuse they experience can take place?

The same goes for the “high-class escort”. As with the strip performer and the cam performer, there is no “worker exploitation” occurring here as a socialist would understand the term worker (although of course, exploitation is occurring along sex-class lines). In fact, Marx himself stated that for worker exploitation to occur, the following social relation had to occur: firstly, the individual had to be free from any kind of slave-owner or employer (check); and secondly, they had to be “free” from any other means of subsistence, thus being “hurled as free and unattached proletarians on the labour-market”. This second requirement certainly does not apply to situations where a woman can allegedly pick and chose which high-paying contracts she might become party to.

The individual is not being paid a wage for her labour-power, with the capitalist receiving the surplus value. The relationship does not resemble anything akin to a capitalist exploiting a worker for their labour-power, as no capital is invested. It is simply the transfer of revenue from one party to another.

Suffice to say, sex trade apologists ignore this inconvenient stratification, and condense both ends of the spectrum — with the non-pimp owned women in the middle — down into one amorphous “sex worker movement”. By blurring the conception of worker to mean “doing something for money”, this necessarily then includes anybody else who might “do something for money” within the wider sex trade, resulting in a totally ambiguous collective consisting of pimps, brothel owners, porn producers, and strip club owners.

And what of the aforementioned women who are neither pimp-controlled or engaging in sexual performance?

This is where we can get down to the nuts and bolts of the issue. It has become a progressive flavour of the week to draw analogies between the “Wages for Housework” movement of the 70s, advocated for by Marxist-Feminists such as Silvia Federici et al, and prostitution. Advocates of this position draw parallels between those women who contribute to the reproduction of the proletariat labour-force within the contexts of marriage and household work by virtue of their unpaid labour in the home. This is including, but not limited to, cooking, cleaning, care work, and most importantly here, sex.

The common thread that links the location of housework as work (albeit unpaid work) and prostitution as unrecognised work can be found in the Marxist-Feminist analysis of marriage. To quote Federici at length:

It was understood — and the feminist movement has analysed it — that men always sell themselves, or try to sell themselves, in the wage labour market. We also sell ourselves in the marriage market. For many women, getting married is an economic solution, because the division of labour has been organised in such a way that it is much more difficult for women to get access to wage jobs. So, many women marry not because they want to, but as an economic solution for their lives. And you have sex because that is part of your job. We performed this deconstruction of sexuality, of the family, of the relationship between men and women, and we said that marriage is prostitution. In many cases, you can have a good relationship with your husband, but it doesn’t matter. The reality is that the way the state has constructed marriage has forced women to rely on marriage for survival and therefore, to offer sex in exchange for subsistence. The state has put us into the situation of prostitution. So we have insisted that there is a continuity between the housewife who at night, after washing dishes and the floor, has to open her legs and have sex, whether she wants it or not, whether she’s tired or not — and many women have been beaten up because they refuse sex — and the woman who sells sex on the street. One sells it to one man and another sells it to many men, but there is a continuity between the two.

This, to put it bluntly, is a rather cavalier parallel. Many people would be mystified at the analogy drawn between marriage and prostitution, and argue along the lines of “they’re obviously not the same thing!”, but this misses the point. Federici is right when she states that marriage has, certainly historically and to a greater or lesser degree currently, forced women into a situation where economic dependence necessitates marriage and all that comes with it (in other words, sex). So the parallels between marriage — where the woman “sells it to one man” — and the prostituted woman who “sells it to many men” appear to make economic sense.

This, coupled with the other aspects of marriage — all of the unpaid domestic labour, the cooking, the cleaning, the care work — result in what has been conceptualised in Marxist terms as the reproduction of the work force. By doing all these things, the woman literally reproduces new labourers — and also current labourers who could not face the new working day without this care work — which circuitously results in further extraction of surplus value as the labour force is expanded by the introduction of new workers, and the capitalist can lower wages, thus increasing their profit margins.

Without delving into an analysis of whether wages for housework is a “good” or “bad” thing, the point of the argument is, as Federici states:

“…to demand wages for housework does not mean to say that if we are paid we will continue to do it. It means precisely the’ opposite. To say that we want money for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it…”

It would seem then that by recognising prostitution as this type of unpaid and unrecognised labour, similar to the woman who “sells herself to one man” within marriage, that the demand for it to be recognised as work is one in which would instigate a new class-recognition amongst women as part of the labour force.

However, and with great respect to Federici who is a tremendous theorist and academic, this seems to gloss over the fundamental relationship between the existence of marriage — and importantly, monogamy — as an institution, and the system of prostitution. To quote Friedrich Engels in Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the States:

“We thus have three principal forms of marriage which correspond broadly to the three principal stages of human development. For the period of savagery, group marriage; for barbarism, pairing marriage; for civilization, monogamy, supplemented by adultery and prostitution.

Thus, it is argued here that the system of marriage and the system of prostitution are necessary, but inverse, correlates. To parse that in a slightly less dry manner: they depend on each other to exist, but at polar opposites of the same conceptual spectrum. To quote Engels again:

monogamy and prostitution are indeed contradictions, but inseparable contradictions, poles of the same state of society

Marriage and prostitution developed hand in hand because it allowed men to act on their non-monogamous impulses by cheating on their wives with a woman who was not his wife. This sounds tautological, but the distinction between the wife and the prostituted woman is absolutely fundamental to understanding why marriage and housework as “labour” is not the same thing as prostitution as “labour”.

The man visits the prostituted woman precisely because she is not his wife. He can utilise her body for sexual relief without any concern for reproduction, or emotional and financial investment (beyond the immediate payment). There is nothing in the relationship between the married man and the prostituted woman that resembles the relationship of marriage as it would be understood in worker terms. Nothing is produced or reproduced in prostitution, and that is entirely the point. Domestic housework and sex may well be reconceptualised as work (although that is not without its problems), as it contributes to the literal reproduction of the labour-pool for the exploitative capitalist; prostitution does not.

This is clear to see in modern day Women’s Strikes— where women take to the streets to highlight that without their unrecognised domestic work, the world would likely grind to a halt. Can the same be said for prostitution as a system of so-called work? It would appear not. It should be noted as well, this is absolutely not a callous analysis of the women within prostitution, or a suggestion that the women should just be “done away with”, it is an analysis of the absolute misery of the system itself. Just as socialists do not hate the workers within capitalism, this analysis does not reflect on the women trapped within prostitution. It is an analysis of a system of brutal and violent oppression and exploitation. To suggest otherwise is to distract attention away from the capitalist in the worker-exploitation dynamic, and from the male punter in the prostitution dynamic.