Empowered by 'sex work'

What an excellent suggestion.

DumondeB your posts are really great, and really important. Please do bung them on Medium if you can as they deserve a wide audience

Yeah, the "we all have to do things we don't want to do" argument is crap. There isn't a crime of "being forced to make spreadsheets", is there? Sexual acts that we do not fully consent to usually make people feel violated. Perhaps there are other jobs that result in people feeling traumatised and violated, but in that case, people shouldn't be doing those either!

The only case I can think of is where people have to deal with other people's atrocities. I imagine the people in India trawling through Facebook posts looking for images of child abuse feel fairly violated as well. If we're arguing that prostitution is as wholesome as being paid subsistence wages for looking at child pornography all day, then you may have a debate.

Thank you springfern for raising this, and for everyone's comments. They have all given me much to mull over.

My thoughts right now:
If women instinctively feel that men have all the power and will take sex anyway, and men see the only value a woman's body has is for their sexual gratification, does telling themselves that sex is no big deal, and sex work is empowering, make women feel less disempowered (or less painfully aware of the disempowerment imposed by a patriarchy)?

If women are getting so little from relationships that are driven by what men want, because men want what they see in porn, that the only way women can feel they get what they want is to want what they get, would getting paid for 'what they want' be empowering? (sorry that's worded SO badly!)
So the women who are advocating sex work, but not actually in it, may need that view to take the sting out of any disempowerment they feel within their relationships/society.

And if the difference of sex is minimalised then of course some would, and do, argue that rape is no big deal. For a rape survivor to do so (and I know) can be a way of processing what happened in a way they can handle. But, that has horrendous repercussions for women and society, many of which I think we are seeing. And again, how many women have to minimalise the difference between sex and anything else because it is the only way to deal with sexual trauma they have previously suffered?
I could ramble on but i'm not really going anywhere, but thank you for all the food for thought.

I read a depressing article recently by a 'sex worker' from California who was lobbying the state legislature there to change the law to try and stop the sex trafficking of young girls because sex work is self-regulating, apparently, and women who participate in it are 'empowered' and part of a great community etc etc.

She gave her account of how she found her way into sex work and it was the most depressing story of disempowerment I'd ever read. An older boyfriend got her into cam work that he took a cut of her earnings from i.e. he was her pimp, although he didn't seem to be able to see that, she progressed from that to street prostitution and then from there to working in porn. All along the way, men were making money off her body. She was being exploited but couldn't see it. All she could see was that she was 'choosing' to do what she did so it was 'empowering'.

I don't know how you change the minds of women like that. At some point, she clearly decided to construct this delusional narrative to convince herself that she was choosing to let men exploit her body for their financial gain, not being coerced into it by a lack of any other choices. How can anyone get past that level of self delusion?

@DuMondeB I hope writing these posts isn't bringing up things that are difficult (you said you don't like to dwell on it much). They are great posts though.

You raise something that I think stands in general across our society (maybe on a tangent from this discussion), which is that when people do not understand what trauma, in this case primarily sexual, does to a child, they are blind to a lot of the underlying challenges in our society. If people don't know that girls who have been sexually abused often (not always of course, but there is an upward curve in the data) go on to become hyper sexualised in teenage years and their twenties, they cannot see why sex work could feel empowering. If their lives have been relatively safe, at least to the point where they didn't feel at threat regularly as a child, they can't understand that the ability to live with the underlying constant threat in sex work is essentially a brain injury, rather than because they are empowered. I don't say that pejoratively, I had this "injury" too and put myself in situations that my friends who'd had stable, loving upbringings couldn't tolerate. I thought they were strange at the time. Now I see they had a healthily regulated nervous system and didn't dissociate.

No, it doesn't make any sense, it's not as if sucking a is a skill or talent, is it, really? It's not a necessity, men can use their hand or a sex toy instead. With lots of other jobs, it is something that is really needed, but this is not. Men aren't going to die if they don't have access to women's bodies.

What I worry about is this being legal and unemployed women going to job centres and being told they have to take a sex ''job'' or else they'll have their money cut or stopped. It looks that's the way this ''empowering'' sh*t is headed, to me.

Saying it is empowering is like the sort of thing an abuser would tell you to convince you to do something.

I'm sure if the women doing it had an offer of another job with the same pay, they'd soon give up being sex slaves (that's how I view this, as slavery).

If it's so empowering why aren't men doing it as well then, renting out their bodies?

Most of the women saying it's empowering likely wouldn't do it themselves.

I feel it's all a bunch of people just trying to make themselves look like ''accepting'', ''good'' people. Actually, they're doing a lot of harm.

How is it empowering though? No one ever explains that do they? What specific power is obtained by the sex worker in the course of their ‘job’? In what way do they feel that letting themselves be fucked by people they wouldn’t choose to fuck if those people weren’t paying to fuck empowers them? It doesn’t make sense.

Sex work is work they say, well, so is hairdressing or teaching or flipping burgers or landscape gardening but no one says that kind of work is empowering. Why not? What is it about sex work that makes it empowering when other work where you don’t have to let creepy strangers fuck you isn’t?

Empowerment is the illusion of the thing. Power is the thing itself.

God this drives me mad! It's NOT empowering at all. I'm 20 and I know so many girls my age (and younger) that like to be 'pro-sex work' and campaign for prostitution etc. Also online there are so many young girls who make themselves insta famous out of being half naked all the time.

I don't know that it is necessarily going to convince a lot of people that it's intrinsically different than other kinds of work, because many types of work can have significant physical risks, and disease, and even violence, associated with them

Um yes that's true. Let's think of them.
Police, fire service, ambulance service, frontline social workers, frontline animal welfare workers, oil rig deep sea divers, construction workers, miners , hospital ER workers, prison officers, the armed services, mountain rescue, lifeboat and coastguard patrol.

Can you see a picture emerging? Every single one of those people is doing a job which has the intention of making other people's lives safer and better. We'd all be worse off they stopped doing their jobs.

Prostitution has no benefits for anyone other than the literal and metaphorical wanker but does considerable harm to the women involved and to society as a whole.

Maybe some women who already have some of those factors (the Belle du Jours) can make choices which work for them. I'm not convinced there isn't a lot of mythology surrounding even the high end of prostitution. When Brooke Magnanti was outed she did an interview with Billie Piper where Billie asked about the weirdest thing she'd ever done. She (Brooke) described a man who had her put on a pair of glasses, then ejaculated on them, then had her wipe them on the carpet and finally lick his semen off the carpet. Strangely that encounter didn't make it into the series, probably because rather than being a jolly soft-focus romp it's a bit creepy and sad.

women fleecing men for cash

That's what the "empowerment" narrative really means isn't it?

Both sides basically hold contempt for the other. One side is "empowered" by fleecing pricks who have to pay for it and the other side thinks I know full well you would not do this unless I pay you- but I am paying you and the last laugh's on me

It's not empowering or conducive to good, whether on an individual or societal level.

How distressing to become pregnant with a stranger’s child and to have to make the decision about what to do about it.

Who is considering abortion ‘normal’ medical care with no ethical considerations?

What is your position on prostitution Goosefoot? If you think radical feminist arguments against it are inadequate you could always make some of your own.

Opening up your body’s orifices to strangers with the added risk of pregnancy seems pretty unique in the world of work to me. It’s because people don’t regard women as fully human that they can contemplate that situation with equanimity. Similarly regarding abortion of an unwanted pregnancy as merely a ‘normal’ medical procedure. Women are flesh and blood, not robots.

Every other job makes you a lot less likely to be held prisoner in a hotel room too.

My original version of the long post contained some bad experience stories - I cut them out of this version as there is no opportunity for. content warning (or hiding in spoiler tags). the other thread had been hidden by lot of posters (the OP was looking for support as she had recently started in prostitution).

I think it can feel very different in hindsight - I worry that anyone who feels able to sell sexual consent (male or female) has already been damaged in some way. There is a necessary disassociation that is much easier to reach if you have already lost positive feelings about your body.

I worked in a very fancy place at the absolutely beginning of the lap dancing trend - I knew other young women all over London, from well known places like The Windmill (remember ‘Mrs Hendwrson Presents’?) and Stringfellows to Soho Clip joints and east London stripper boozers where a pint pot went round for coins, rather than notes being stuffed in garters.
These women were bright, hardworking, determined and almost universally damaged, often due to childhood sexual abuse. Prostitution was largely a form of the hyper sexual acting out behaviour that is often seen in abuse survivors,
A way of declaring that the abuser has no lasting power because your body, your sexual agency, isn’t precious anyway.

Some of us gained a lot of strength in each other’s company (which is the only part I would describe as empowering) but others got sucked down as if in a riptide.

I don’t really regret it as such, I don’t think it would do me any good to dwell on it. I really do think fondly of some of my female friends at the time (a gang of women fleecing men for cash feels a bit like thwarting the patriarchy - until you grow up enough to realise that the cash in your handbag means that john’s ex girlfriend won’t be getting her child support that month).

I would crawl across hot coals to stop my daughters doing it - if only I had as much love and respect for little me as I have for my children.

Is that different enough from everything else?

Pregnancy is a good argument I think, though maybe not so much from the POV of the woman if you consider it just normal medical care with no ethical considerations to decide not to continue with one. But I think you could make a pretty strong case from the POV of the potential child to know and be supported by his or her father.

As far as the rest of your list, I don't know that it is necessarily going to convince a lot of people that it's intrinsically different than other kinds of work, because many types of work can have significant physical risks, and disease, and even violence, associated with them.

I also wonder if people who say sex is intrinsically different really believe that mainly because of the possibility of pregnancy? I'm not so sure, I think they would also claim that male homosexual prostitution was the same without any possibility of pregnancy or a child. It's a notable difference from conservative arguments about prostitution that they will tend to talk about this element openly, but you don't tend to see it so much from leftists. Maybe because they don't have a language developed or accepted to talk about those ideas? I'm not sure but I think it's an important omission.

There also isn't another job where the customer is literally allowed to penetrate your orifices.

If your employer demanded access to your vagina as a requirement of your current job, what you do?

"But what they often don't offer people is a clear argument or idea or sense of what makes sex different than other things."

Sex creates babies. There is no other job where pregnancy by your client could be a side effect of the transaction. Or STDs for that matter. There isn't another job that's going to give you syphillis, HIV or chlamydia.

Is that different enough from everything else?

The Belle DuJour types will find it a lot harder to leave behind nowadays - 20 years ago phones flipped open and had a pull out aerial. No photos, no screen shots. Fake name. No social media, no reverse image search... much harder to stay anonymous nowadays.

I thought this Morning Star article about the failure to meaningfully unionise the sex ‘industry’ was excellent:

morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/sex-work-organising-lot-hot-air

The other thing is, if it’s work, how come men pay more for the young and inexperienced? Because no other workplace I’ve ever known works like that.

I had someone argue that we all sell our bodies if we work, we just sell our muscles to stack beans or dig roads etc, and if I think selling my vagina is different to selling my arm and leg muscles that's just my hang-ups about my genitals. I still haven't worked out the answer to that one.

He's full of shit, guarantee he'd feel like his penis or anus was a different kind of muscle to his arm or leg if his boss was demanding he use it during work time! That is just a trolling comment, they don't believe it, it's a standard men's rights activist talking point. Liken sex trafficking to conscription - the death rates are probably about the same.

When was the last time they sold access to the inside of their body? Digging roads comes with workplace safety, protective work wear, legal and fair work contracts, unions. Ask them how they can make it safe for a you to be enclosed in a private space with a man who is entitled to access the inside of your body. What would be necessary to pass a health and safety inspection? How much would those necessities cost?

But what they often don't offer people is a clear argument or idea or sense of what makes sex different than other things.

I'm thinking along different lines. The people who take the line that sex work is 'empowering' and therefore a Good Thing are the ones treating sex as something different.

The point being that when it comes to other activities, we can easily see that not everything which someone may find to some degree 'empowering' is good, either for the individual or others. Men may find their physical strength empowering, or carrying a knife, or the 'respect' of gang membership or the money earned through drugs. Just because something is 'empowering' doesn't make it valid.

And of course, for many women sex work isn't truly empowering anyway.
Education is empowering. Equality is empowering. Being respected is empowering. Maybe some women who already have some of those factors (the Belle du Jours) can make choices which work for them. But this doesn't apply to many. Drug addiction is disempowering. Poverty can be disempowering. Not being respected or treated as an equal, disempowering. Start from there... sex work doesn't seem likely to help.