I'm miles behind here, catching up with some fine wit and some, um, not so fine.
another patriarchal stance of anti-prostitution activists is that women can't decide for themselves. "My body, my choice"? Forget about it!
Here’s the thing about that. Let’s imagine, for a second, I have decided that my vocation is to be a sex worker. I’m not in a wheelchair any more, but I do sometimes walk with a stick. Because of the meds I’m taking, and the changes to my health and lifestyle that stem from being ill, my body is a bit of a mess. I’m not getting any younger. Realistically, the only people who would pay to have sex with me are those who would want to fetishise some part of my non-normativity (and expect me to play along with it), which is not the kind of sex I want. ‘My body, my choice’? No. It’s the punters who get to choose which types of bodies they want to pay for.
Those punters are almost all men, so the ‘market’ for bodies (and the ‘services’ they offer) is determined by male fantasy. This is why sex work is not just work. It doesn’t matter how good or skilled or charming I am; if I’m offering exactly the same ‘services’ as a beautiful 18-year-old girl, it would take me months to earn what she could earn in a few days. A black woman or a transwoman my age might earn even less than me. Our bodies, men’s choices. If a supermarket dared to pay a teenager twice as much as it paid me for doing the same job, I would sue. And win.
The sex worker’s agency — the range of ‘choices’ s/he has — is restricted in other ways too. How many punters can he turn down without falling behind on his student loan repayments? Maybe if she agrees to the types of sex that have a higher market value — generally those that are more painful, dangerous and degrading to her — she can see fewer clients, giving her more time to write her thesis? Sex workers might be ‘happy’ to “decide these things for themselves”, but we can’t pretend they are decided with the same degree of agency, or that the constraints are comparable, as when the punter is choosing the ‘profile’ of the person he wants to pay for sex. And there are a great number of sex workers — a few, like the fictional me, who have chosen the profession; many more who have not — who do not get a chance to make any choices at all.
This brings me back to the other topic in the thread title: privilege. A sex worker’s agency is absolutely contingent on where his or her body ranks in the hierarchy of men’s fantasies, and the degree to which s/he is willing or able to perform the kind of ‘services’ that men want to buy. An ambivalent kind of ‘privilege’ is conferred on such a person if she is young, female, able-bodied, normatively attractive, kinky, doing a PhD, etc. But only because — and for as long as — she conforms to male desire, to the basic power of the punter’s wallet.
What struck me about the tumblr quote is this. It argued (wrongly, in my opinion) that a degree of ‘attractiveness’ was required for a woman to be able to engage in a monogamous, consensual relationship. What it overlooked was that a similar (or greater) degree of ‘attractiveness’ would be required for a woman to make a decent living as a prostitute. And thus to be anti-prostitution is a position that demands no more — and probably less — privilege than would be necessary for a woman who wanted to take money for sex from a desperate punter grant one of life’s fundamental experiences to a luckless individual.