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?
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