‘Sex Work’ and Anarchy? Some ideas…

This leaflet was written for the “Sex Work from an Anarchist Perspective” discussion at the Anarchist Bookfair 09.

Question Authority

Question anyone who claims to represent workers. You may hear (today or whenever discussing this issue) confident claims that “sex workers think x” or “sex workers want y.” You may hear that the thing they want is for men to have more freedom and less restrictions to buy them. That the main thing they want (because they all speak with one voice and the experts, like the ones today, speak for them all) is to defeat Clause 13 of the Policing and Crime bill currently being read (which makes punters responsible for asking whether a woman or child or man they want sex off has been coerced). You might hear that the main thing children and women who sell sex want, is a bigger, free-er, less regulated industry. That there is no problem with managers. That, unlike all other workers, they are happy to not get paid, just work for tips (like they have to in lap dancing clubs around here) That there is no exploitation in the sex industry. That harm is minimal. There is no pressure. No coercion. No grooming. No history of abuse. No poverty. That sex work is intentional. Chosen. Better paid than other crappy jobs, even when just working for tips. That millions of children all around the world grow up aspiring to ‘be sex workers’ and that the ‘sex workers’ on the panel today can tell you, with authority, what they want.

Challenge the Bosses AND Challenge the Union

Challenge claims that unlike people trafficking for agricultural, domestic and sweatshop purposes (which even the Guardian accepts exists!), that unlike other forms of pressured migration, trafficking for sexual purposes doesn’t exist. That it is a myth, a moral panic, ‘victim feminist’ bleating on the part of women who just don’t seem to get how that the neoliberal sex industry has empowered children and women. Query claims that ‘sex workers’ are mostly or 50% male; that the global sex industry is not driven by men wanting to buy women and girls. Challenge claims that the industry is not as murderously exploitative as other big business. Challenge any union that uses the underground nature of the industry to hide figures, hide the ratio of managers to ground-level workers in its membership. Challenge any union or ‘prostitutes group’ which doesn’t fight managers. Which doesn’t campaign against exploitation or fight for proper wages. Which doesn’t challenge workplace structure. Which never ever threatens to withdraw labour. Which never mentions industrial action because (unlike everywhere else) there’s no problem with bosses, only with regulation. Which informs you about the internal injuries you’re going to get, but doesn’t suggest getting out.

Dig deep

Dig deep into yourself and ask yourself why you don’t work in a brothel. If ‘sex work’ is so ok, and those millions of women and children and men choose it, why don’t you? Jobcentres have started advertising for female phone sex line operators, web-cam performers and lap dancers. Should young women be made to take those jobs? No? What if demand outstrips supply? Should there ever be restriction on global male sexual entitlement or should men just be able to get what they want, how they want, when they want it?

Talk to the People, Let the People talk to you

Don’t believe me. Don’t believe the IUSW. Don’t believe the ECP. Even, don’t believe the Poppy project! Don’t just believe educated, relatively privileged people talking shit at bookfairs. Before you slope off to the pub tonight, why not do your own research? Why not chat to the women working the Mile End Road – about their lives, the conditions of their work, whether they chose it, whether they like it. How they define sex. Whether they have orgasms. What THEY identify as the real issues which affect their work. Get a translator — Lithuanian, Bantu, Bengali, Uzbek — talk to them!

Imagine A World Not Based on Male Sexual Entitlement

Think about sex. Be honest about your experience, whether you’re male or female. Some people define sex as experience/s and processes pleasurable to any/all concerned. Some people query whether men paying to get serviced is, actually, ‘sex’ and therefore whether the term ‘sex work’ might be bullshit. Some people query whether women and children actually get off on servicing men as much as popularly portrayed on tv or porn. Try to differentiate between fantasy and reality. Question whether internet porn (which increasingly drives what men demand) really serves women and children (and also men) sexually. And FINALLY If you are going to speculate about a libertarian utopia where all transactional sex is fine, why not imagine a reversal of power relations. Like, art, architecture, popular culture, based on genuine self-defined female sexualities. Imagine cunt shaped cavernous buildings with indoor waterfalls and sheelagh na gigs everywhere. Imagine everything based on representations of clitorises and wombs and contractions and aspects of women’s real bodies. Imagine everyone was based around females being served and serviced. I’m not even saying this is a good thing! But it is a thought. Have fun speculating, But try to remember real power relations in the real world, here and now.

Panel Talk: ‘Sex Work from an Anarchist Perspective’

Panel Talk given to The London Anarchist Forum ‘Sex Work From an Anarchist Perspective’ meeting at the London Anarchist Book Fair 2009 on Saturday 24 October 2009

I began by challenging the final point of the previous speaker who said that until we lived in a utopian society “transactional sex will be necessary”. I said,

We have to challenge the notion that men are entitled to sex. That it’s their right and women should just ‘do their duty’ and supply it. Sex isn’t a human ‘need’—you don’t die without it. If you see it as necessary; see male sexual demand as paramount, then what happens when demand exceeds supply? Do you encourage women into the industry? Force them? What happens when men want under 16s? Under 13s? Are men sexually entitled to anything they want? Should young women or men have their benefits withdrawn if they don’t want to do the lap dance jobs that are beginning to be advertised in jobcentres?

You can’t look at either sex work or the sex industry outside the context of extreme global inequality based on gender, class, race and capitalism. That the facts around who services who, are connected to the WHO gender demographics (which they have been compiling since 1975) indicating that males own/control the vast majority of the world’s wealth, land, water, food, access to health care, means of production and means of reproduction in the world. Which means that females suffer huge inequality. In other words, globally, women do the work and men get the profit. It is in this context that people, women and children end up servicing sometimes violent, not very nice, ill-smelling strangers.

‘Sex workers rights’ professionals tend to claim to speak for ‘sex workers’. Their literature categories everyone—from a shop assistant in a sex shop, to owners of chains of escort agencies, to African woman working off debt bondage in a European brothel—equally as a ‘sex worker’. Recently ‘sex workers rights’ professionals have focused almost solely on defeating Clause 14 of the Policing and Crime Bill now being read by the Lords, a clause which seeks to regulate demand by requiring punters to ascertain that the person they are buying sex off has not been coerced. ‘Sex workers rights’ professionals tell us that ‘sex workers’ main aim is to defeat this and other regulatory legislation; that worldwide, ‘sex workers’ want only total legalisation so as to be free to ply their trade in a deregulated industry

Problems with this approach include:

1. People throughout the global sex industry (which is massive and up there with Big Oil, Big Construction, Big Pharma and Agriculture/Biotech) have different agendas. Managers and bosses have different agendas than on the ground workers.

2. ‘Sex work’ is not a consciously chosen profession that young people aspire to enter and want to remain in and want to promote as a profession. Even when not actively forced it is for many women an incidental default occupation

3. ‘Sex work’ is not gender neutral, with equal numbers of men doing it or women demanding. It is driven by male demand for women and girls and boys.

4. ‘Experts’ speaking for workers is particularly dangerous in such a profitable industry as this. It is imperative for people to do their own research, talk to people (and not just white men) ON THE GROUND who sell sex and find out what the conditions of their lives and work are.

4. If you are not a ‘sex worker’, why not? Imagine (whatever age or gender you are) having young children and no assets/savings/support, needing money immediately. Which would you rather do, be a cleaner or service the middle aged men who are the demographic purchasers. Obvious — ‘Sex work’ is so much more glamorous and better paid, right? And you only need to see a few punters a week, right? Ok, do it for six months. Then evaluate.

5. The physical realities for women selling sex are frequently ignored by libertarians and ‘sex work’ experts. Physical violence aside, they include: the constant pressure to not use condoms, the demand for more extreme sex like DP TP DA etc. driven by porn. STDs. Chronic internal injury. Anorgasmia (the chronic inability to come) from the combination of numbness and over stimulation of the pelvic area. Compromised immunity. And the psychological waste. Which there is no point in denying exists until you have actually done your own, grassroots research with people (again, including people who aren’t white middle class college students doing it for a few months). Why not get out there and get the full picture?

The desire to protect ‘sex work’ (‘sex’ in quotes because it isn’t real sex for the person doing the servicing) stems from a desire on the part of the white middle class imperialist elite to continue to have an underclass of workers, some but not all migrants, servicing their lives and deflating the cost of their commodities. (Workers who want nothing but to service this the elite for slave or no wages). Cheap veg, cheap clothes, cheap domestic labour, cheap sex. ( For example, workers in east London lap dancing clubs work for no wages, just tips, but don’t seem to get a mention in any of the ‘sex worker’ rights organisations’ literature.)

Hence unionising; eg a union for ‘sex workers’. Indeed maybe such a union would be viable IF it tackled (lack of) wages, just working for tips, an end to rip off £300/day walk up flats, violent punters, organising to limit numbers of clients, industrial relations, problem managers, organising to withdraw labour when necessary, and provide exit strategies.

The intensity of the desire to be cheaply serviced means that even people who claim to have an anti capitalist analysis, and support other health and safely legislation and precautionary regulations in other industries, totally roll over re. the sex industry when it demands more freedom, normalisation and expansion. Ultimately for all the discourse about ‘rights’ and authoritative claims about ‘what sex workers want’ the ‘rights’ lobby’s hostility to regulation is based on an extreme neoliberal freemarket ideology.

I’d say, bring it back to the women, the children on the street. Talk to them. Listen. Then decide.

Panel Talk: ‘Sex Work From An Anarchist Perspective’

Panel Talk given by Joy to The London Anarchist Forum ‘Sex Work From An Anarchist Perspective’ meeting at the London Anarchist Book Fair 2009 on Saturday 24 October 2009

You know, I hope Noam Chomsky [1] is wrong when he says that if you want to marginalise a view you put it on right at the end of the day, when everyone is tired, no-one wants to listen any more, and people are getting up to get cups of tea [2]. I’m going to read three quotes. One’s going to be quite long, so please bear with me; the second will be just one paragraph; and the third will be a one-liner. All quotes are from the same book, which is about gender justice.

When you ask the question ‘What is good sex?’ you are also asking, I suggest, ['I' in this case being John Stoltenberg [3]] a question that is profoundly political, because its answer requires an inquiry into structures of power disparity between people – political structures based primarily on gender and also on race, money, and age. Is sex perceived to be good ultimately with reference to those categories? – for instance, does a man perceive sex to be good because he experiences it as enhancing his hold on the status of his gender; through the act of fucking, for instance, does he feel politically empowered, sensorially attached to his membership in a superior sex caste; does he therefore perceive fucking per se as good sex? Or is sex good to the extent that it transcends power inequities – to the extent that sex between two individuals mitigates the power disparity that they bring with them from the social context? In theory, two people might approach a particular sexual encounter either as a ritual celebration of the social power differences between people in general and between them in particular or as a personal act of repudiating all such power inequities. Someone whose sexuality has become committed to celebrating the political status quo would consider sex good to the extent that its scenario achieves actual and lasting physical sensations of power inequity – through dominance, coercion, force…and so forth. But someone who chose actively to resist the political status quo would consider sex good to the extent that it empowers both partners equally – and to the extent that they succeed together in keeping their intimacy untainted by the cultural context of sexualized inequality. The political question is tough, but it’s important to remember that it is a political question, and that ‘What is good sex?’ is a question about the relationship between the social structure and the particular sex act.

So-called sexual liberation has not provided a conceptual vocabulary that is very useful for discerning whatever is good about good sex either philosophically or politically. There is a lot of mindless jargon in the air (‘”sex positive” is good; “sex negative” is bad.’ ‘Prosex – any kind of sex – is good; antisex is very bad’) combined with a kind of sexual-orientation chauvinism (‘All gay sex is good; no gay sex is bad’ or, as the case may be, ‘All straight sex is good; no straight sex is bad’) that results in a near-total obfuscation of the actual values in particular sexual encounters. In the so-called sexual-liberationist frame of reference, the question ‘What is good sex?’ gets answered pretty quantitatively – in terms of erections, orifices, ejaculations, orgasms, horniness, hotness – and in terms of how far the anatomical experience can be removed from any context of social meaning. In the sexual-liberationist frame of reference, any other notion of good sex is caricatured as ‘goody-goody,’ ‘correct,’ ‘puritan,’ ‘vanilla.’ This frame of reference is derived from the belief that laws, parents, the church and the state, and women in general were all forces of repression keeping men from having as many outlets as they pleased for their so-called sexual tension. But today there is no way to ask the question ‘What is good sex?’ merely in terms of sexual-liberationist rhetoric. Today the question must be asked looking at a social structure that is essentially male supremacist and looking at the function of sexual behaviour in that structure – at how sexual action in private can reflect and keep intact larger social structures of dominance and submission, at how hatred of ‘the other’ can be sexualized until it no longer feels like hate because it feels so much like sex. And there is no way anymore that anyone can answer the question ‘What is good sex?’ without in some sense expressing either a reactionary or a revolutionary political position – an opinion, a point of view, about the male supremacy of the social order: whether it should stay the same . . . or whether it should not.

That was the first quote and, as I said, the longest. The next is just one paragraph. It begins the section headed, What Is The Relationship Between Good Sex and Commercial Representations of Sex?

Explicit representations of sex in commercial films and videos reflect and influence what many men imagine and perceive to be ‘good sex.’ Seen on the screen, the sex in sex films epitomizes the kind of sex, and the values in that sex, that men as a class (or at least as a consumer market) aspire to. To view sex acts through the medium and technology of film or video is therefore like looking through a window at what millions and millions of men believe is the best sex there is: sex that purports to be good – or ‘great,’ as the case may be.

The third and final extract about gender justice is, as promised, a one-liner:

The core of one’s being must love justice more than manhood.

Stoltenberg uses the word “manhood” here because these are all quotes from his book, Refusing to Be a Man. By that, Stoltenberg was not refusing to be male – because he is male, so that would be absurd. No, what he was refusing to be was a Man with a capital M, as in the case of “being the Man there,” always having to be in control and on top in our dominator society; and Stoltenberg is repudiating that.

Well, that’s my three quotes from Stoltenberg. Now I just want to comment on Steve Ash’s keynote speech where he said that sex work is “necessary” and will still be “necessary” in an anarchist society. Now, when I heard the talk was about sex I thought, oh good that’s sounds great, we can discuss the works of Shere Hite [4] – excellent! But then I realised it was about sex WORK. Well, I’m disappointed in that – I thought anarchists wanted to get RID of work. And money? I thought anarchists wanted to get rid of MONEY, too. Furthermore, if prostitution were to continue in an anarchist society, then women would also become entitled to sexual servicing, which would make the anarchism proposed by Steve some kind of ‘equal rights’ anarchism where, after the revolution, women become empowered to abuse and oppress others in the way we are abused and oppressed now. That’s not what I thought anarchism was. What I want is gender justice anarchism, not equal rights anarchism. The radical feminist Andrea Dworkin wisely said there are as many sexualities as there are people [5], but are there as many anarchisms as there are anarchists? Thank you. I’ll end there and turn it over to questions from the floor.

 

[1] Noam Chomsky is a philosopher and anarchist.

[2] The book fair had begun at 10am that day. Joy was the sixth and final speaker in the panel at the last meeting (which had begun late and was held in a stuffy and crowded room). By now, it was almost 6pm.

[3] John Stoltenberg is a long-time radical feminist activist against sexual violence and philosopher of gender. He is the author of Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice (rev. ed. UCL Press, 2000), The End of Manhood: Parables on Sex and Selfhood (rev. ed. UCL Press, 2000), and What Makes Pornography Sexy? (Milkweed Editions, 1994), as well as numerous articles and essays in anthologies. In addition to speaking and writing, John works professionally in publishing in New York City, where he has been Managing Editor of five national magazines and served as editorial and creative consultant to many other publications. For Men Can Stop Rape [6], he conceived and creative directs the ‘My strength is not for hurting’ media campaign [7].

[4] See, for example, Hite, Shere The New Hite Report. The Revolutionary Report on Female Sexuality Updated (2000)

[5] As quoted in Stoltenberg, John Living With Andrea (1994) “I especially remember where Andrea writes that “‘man’ and ‘woman’ are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs” and that “we are . . . a multisexed species.” As I described it 15 years later in my own first book, “that liberating recognition saved my life.”"
http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/LivingWithAndrea.html

[6] http://www.mencanstoprape.org/

[7] This paragraph about John Stoltenberg is taken from the Contributors section of Stark, Christine and Whisnant, Rebecca (eds) Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography (2004)

The Flaws in this Anarchist Response to Prostitution

This leaflet was written for the “Sex Work from an Anarchist Perspective” discussion at the Anarchist Bookfair last weekend.

As radical feminists we feel that there are fundamental flaws and dishonesties to today’s workshop on prostitution*. The organisers of this meeting will tell us that this is not a gendered issue, because in theory women have the right to be sexually serviced too. We will be told that the sex industry doesn’t exist because of male demand, and that there is equivalent demand for/industrial scale of, adult men servicing women. We will be told that, unlike other industries, in the sex industry, demand is rarely met through the coercion of extreme poverty, deception, or more direct violent control.

We will be told that we should not look at women as a class, that instead we have to concentrate on ‘individual women’ in their ‘unique situation’, but the ‘free’ prostitute we will be asked to consider does not exist. She really really wants to be a prostitute (in spite of how dangerous it currently is) and she came to this choice free of poverty, addiction, a history of abuse, violent coercion, manipulation or social pressure. Who is she? Where is she? What remote island was she raised on free from patriarchal pressure (because we would dearly love to move there)? Also, how is she, and the handful of her elite sisters and brothers engaging in ‘free’ prostitution, going to be able to meet demand when men feel entitled to order up a prostitute the same way they order up a takeaway pizza?

It will be denied that the normalisation and expansion of the sex industry affects the social status of all women and girls, and reinforces male dominance and male entitlement; apparently this is an “empty generalisation” compared to our putative ‘free’ prostitute. Saying this is not a gendered issue because women have the right to be sexually serviced too is like claiming anti-vagrancy laws don’t discriminate against the poor because millionaires aren’t allowed to sleep under bridges either.

We maintain that there is a physical and psychological reality to sex, that women’s bodies are not insensate lumps of meat and the vagina/anus is not a passive open hole. There is a physical and psychological reality to being penetrated multiple times a day when you are not aroused; without poverty, without more direct coercion, what would motivate any woman or man to do this?

Some sex industry apologists feel that ‘sex work’ will be necessary in an anarchist society, that if “some men can’t get laid” they have the right to be sexually serviced – so much for women’s ‘sexual freedom’, this is in essence about ensuring men get sexually serviced. Sexual pleasure is an inalienable human right, unless you are the person doing the sexual servicing, at which point it becomes just ‘work’, and having to service all the men who ‘can’t get laid’ is no big deal, physically or psychologically.

If all men have a right to be sexually serviced, and serviced the way they want, when they want, by who they want, someone somewhere will then have to lose the right to say no. What will happen, in our future anarchist society, when not enough women freely choose to be ‘free’ prostitutes? Will some new way be found to manipulate women into it? Will it become an obligation all women have to fulfil, like taking your turn cleaning the toilets? How will this ‘obligation’ be enforced?

The tired old argument about ‘needing’ prostitution to protect (other) women from rape is a gross insult to all the men who manage not to be rapists, even when they ‘can’t get laid’, and is a fundamental misunderstanding of what rape is. Men do not commit rape because they can’t control themselves, it is not a crime of sexual excess, it is a crime of power, of domination and control. Even if rape did occur because men just couldn’t hold it in any longer, how is it going to work in a system of ‘free’ prostitution, with its inevitable long waiting lists given the inevitable scarcity of those wishing to be ‘free’ prostitutes?

Arguments about prostitution being driven underground are just more tacit acknowledgement that this is about men’s right to be sexually serviced, if the men using prostitutes really cared about their welfare, there wouldn’t be any coerced prostitution in the first place. This is also tacit acknowledgement that ‘free’ prostitution will never meet demand as it currently stands.

Saying that the best we can offer poor women is a ‘safe’ way to be sexually assaulted for money is saying that female poverty and male sexual violence is inevitable, and that the world will never change in any significant way. It is also a veiled threat against all women: give us (men) what we want, or we’ll take it anyway and worse.

The ‘anarchism’ on display here is nothing more than a desire to give male supremacism free reign, from men who are not prepared to give up any power.

* We are using the term prostitution rather than ‘sex work’, because the term ‘sex work’ is a deliberate obfuscation which covers up the exploitation inherent in the sex industry (consider the term ‘juvenile sex worker’ used to describe child victims of commercial sexual exploitation). It obscures the lived experience of those directly engaged in transactional sex, it obscures power relations between workers and bosses. Pimps, pornographers, brothel keepers, escort agency managers, telephone sex line operators, those working behind the till in sex shops and sperm donors all call them selves ‘sex workers’.

ARF at the Anarchist Bookfair 09

Autonomous Radical Feminists will have a stall and be holding a meeting at this year’s Anarchist Bookfair:

Men Women Black White Rich Poor: Understanding Our Privileges and Vulnerabilities in the Crash

Many of us here today live privileged lives, many of us are white, educated, articulate; our lives serviced and subsidised by poorer, more vulnerable people. As radical feminists we understand that, in times of scarcity, the privileged hold onto their power and the vulnerable suffer. Conservatism becomes entrenched along with increased tolerance of racism, class privilege, anti immigration sentiment and violence against/contempt for women. We see it in employment stats, miniscule rape conviction rates, and the lack of funding for Crisis services and the increasing commodification/pornification of culture. As capitalism collapses around us, how do we keep our humanity and courage intact, in order to work together across widening divisions in society, and to protect the most vulnerable?

2.00-2.50pm, Room EB 4 (Below Octagon Room stalls)

No Pretence

Amazing anarca-feminist action at this year’s Anarchist Movement Conference.

This is the short film that was screened:

We are tired of being told that anarchists don’t need to be feminists, because ‘anarchism has feminism covered’. This is just a convenient way of forgetting the reality of gender oppression, and so ignoring the specifics of the struggle against it.

The Sex Industry is Highjacking the Left

The sex industry is highjacking the left. Lobbyists for the sex industry have been given a platform at the anti-capitalist, pro-development events taking place around the G20 Summit in London, this is our response:

Fellow Workers: Do we accept the control of others’ sexuality as ‘work like any other’? Do we want to embrace escort agency owners, brothel managers and lap dancing entrepreneurs as comrades?

The IUSW (‘International Union of Sex Workers’) along with other sex industry advocate groups is working with the Lap Dancing Association, Escort Agency owners and punters to deregulate the sex industry. Claiming to speak for all sex workers, they are fighting for more Lap Dancing Venues, continued ‘café style’ licensing for sex establishments, and more widespread sex work ads in Jobcentres.

The IUSW does not distinguish between workers and managers. It identifies owners, controllers and punters equally as sex workers and encourages their membership. It does not promote collective or worker-owned brothels, simply denying any conflict of interest or inequality, between those who ‘sell sex’ and those who ultimately profit from its sale. They deny all research on the incidence of trafficking, maintaining it is rare and that forced prostitution is a myth.

Their recent campaign is focused on stopping the Policing and Crime Bill currently in session. In relation to the sex industry, it aims to: create a new offence of paying for sex with someone who is controlled for gain and introduce new powers to close brothels, modify the law on soliciting, and tighten up the regulation of lap-dancing clubs by reclassifying them as ‘sex encounter establishments’ rather than ‘entertainment’ venues. Although minimal, symbolic and largely unenforceable, it is at least a notional recognition of the harm of pimping and trafficking.

The claim that prostitution is ‘work like any other’ ignores the physical and psychological harm involved. Accepting it as ‘work like any other’ eradicates women’s sexual agency, and reduces sex, for women, to just another piece of drudgework women (or the underclass of prostituted women necessary to fulfil the imperatives of male demand) must undertake to survive, no different to scrubbing a toilet. If sex, for women, is no different to scrubbing a toilet, then rape can’t be that big a deal either. Our culture already sees rape as trivial, the normalisation of prostitution as ‘work like any other’ is gradually helping to cement that attitude.

There is nothing radical about the sex industry. There is nothing transgressive. It is fundamentally a part of the status quo. The sex industry is capitalism in its purest essence, reducing whole people to commodities. The sex industry is also patriarchy in its purest essence, the hierarchy between men and women reified. Patriarchy has always required a class of prostituted women, and has tacitly condoned the sexual abuse of girl children to create this class.

We are feminists and trade unionists. We call for our brothers in the union movement to fight for a fundamental gender equality, which includes fighting the presumption of unlimited access to female bodies through the sex industry. People are NOT FOR SALE.

Increasingly, the media promotes the myth that prostitution is a free, empowering choice. We don’t hear about the boredom, the pelvic inflammatory disease, the sexual dysfunction occasioned by numbing repetitive penetration, the STDs, the pressure to not wear a condom, the 12-hour shifts and the exhaustion, the reality of not being particularly liked or respected by punters. The voices of women harmed in the sex industry are ignored, dismissed as one-offs who made ‘bad choices.’

Prostitution itself is not illegal. But the argument to legalise brothels and further expand all areas of the industry lest it be ‘driven underground into the hands of criminals’ applies equally to child prostitution. Should we legalise child prostitution to keep it ‘out of the hands of criminals’ and to allow frequent health checks and free condoms for prostituted children?

Accepting prostitution as inevitable is to accept that women’s poverty is inevitable, that men’s sexual violence is inevitable. The sex industry is an institution, it creates a demand for women and children that can only be met through poverty and coercion, poor women deserve better choices than between prostitution and poverty.

If prostitution is the ‘only’ available way out of poverty for large numbers of women and children, as claimed by sex industry advocates, should western aid workers, businessmen and soldiers working in the developing world be encouraged to ‘help’ women and children survive by buying them? Should we turn the developing world into one giant brothel to service the west? Or should we fight for real change, and real routes out of poverty?

Should we change society to suit the globally tiny minority of people who claim to actively want to engage in prostitution? Should we accept any industry just because some people want to work in it? How about the arms industry, or the oil industry? What other industries have benefited from deregulation?

Far from promoting freedom and empowerment, the IUSW and other sex industry advocates are exploiting the economic crisis to try to push through their laissez-faire agenda. They are trying to apply the same kind of ‘shock tactics’ used in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Iraq after the US invasion, and Sri Lanka after the Tsunami, to push through what is ultimately a neo-liberal, ultra-capitalist agenda.

Flyer for the sex worker open university

We are glad ‘the feminist anti prostitution argument’ will be discussed here today. The workshop looks good and we hope it will be productive.

As anti-prostitution feminist activists we may be ‘on the other side’ but there are things we share: we want everyone, sexworker or not, to be safe, to have autonomy in their lives and control over their sexuality.

But. As you celebrate sexwork this weekend, bear in mind the bigger picture. This event may be ‘alternative’ with a more politicised, and LGBTQ sensibility, but consider the following points about the sex industry within the larger society we live in.

• We all live under patriarchy (or, as bell hooks puts it, white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy), and in the context of an Earth where men, as men, own and control most of the money, land, food and resources, men buying sexual access to woman is not a neutral process.

• The demand to buy sex, globally, is overwhelmingly male (C4 docs about rich ladies buying Gambian men notwithstanding). It’s about men buying women and children.

• The rise of internet porn, and the mainstreaming of the sex industry, is pushing an agenda of disinhibited, unrestrained, male entitlement.

• It is changing sexual and social relations, especially amongst teens.

• Not for the better.

• As social/sexual inhibitions are lost, so are economic ones, accelerating the pace of commodification, pushing the agenda that everything has a market value, and we are all expected to accept this uncritically.

• We’re accused, as radical feminists, of being anti-sex, but the opposite is true. The idea that sex is essentially labour is profoundly anti-sex. We are pro-female sexuality, and think that a liberated, fully expressed female sexuality is incompatible with just servicing men—which is, out there on the streets, what sexwork consists of.

• The everyday reality for most women workers is not the same as it is for politicised LGBTQ sex workers. Contrary to the claim made by organisers in the Guardian on the 3rd April, we do not believe that only a minority of people want to leave the sex industry (just as exact figures on trafficking are notoriously difficult to prove, this statement is unverifiable). If you don’t believe us, just hang around any of the dozens of lap dance clubs and sex establishments around here and talk to the workers as they come off shift, and a different picture will emerge.

• As radical feminists we want always to keep consciousness of coercion and trafficking to the fore: London is a major hub of agricultural, construction, domestic, sex and textile work trafficking, with latest research showing the links between these industries (both in terms of interlinked gangs and workers between the industries. As relatively privileged people we don’t see this underclass. But our lives are subsidised, serviced, eased by their labour.

• Industrial sex happens in a context of a sexually abusive society in which, for many women and children and men, being sexually acted upon has been oppressive not transgressive.

• The expansion of the mainstream sex industry (more porn, more sexwork ads in job centres, more ‘adult entertainment’ venues) is basically counter to the equality between women and men we fight for.

• For these reason, we question the value of recruiting into this industry.

Porn and Sexual Liberation

This is the finished essay of the talk given by Joy as part of the workshop at the Anarchist Bookfair.

Cross-posted at Anti-Porn Feminists

Porn and Sexual Liberation

I’m told that porn is all about choice; the choice to make porn and the choice to use it. I can understand that – we’d all love to have plenty of choice in our sex lives. And I can see there’s plenty of choice involved in porn: business choice for the pornographers, economic choice for the multi-national porn industry, consumer choice for porn users. Pornographers, the porn industry, the johns, all exercise their choice to profit from the sale and use of women’s, children’s and men’s bodies. The former three have the greater choices (if what the latter are left with can be said to even constitute a choice at all).

I’m told that porn is just fantasy, not to be taken seriously. But porn is not fantasy, the pictures and recordings are of real live human beings just like you and me but, instead of being portrayed as individuals, as human beings, they are treated as fragmented body parts; women, men and children are depicted and used as holes, cunts, living sex aids, receptacles for the depositing of waste fluids, just so you and I can have our sexual freedom, and the porn industry can count its profits.

The porn industry: A multi-national multi-billion currency industry. ‘Industry’ sounds respectable – it’s only work – but we know from other multi-national industrialists that work isn’t necessarily respectable. Tears fall, quite rightly, when we hear of the exploitation of sweat-shop workers, but when it’s the blood, sweat, tears and other bodily fluids of people in porn at issue, we get told that it’s not exploitation it’s sexual freedom. Whose sexual freedom? Economic freedom for the porn industry, sexual and economic exploitation for the workers.

I’ve been told that people in the porn industry love it. It’s their sexual freedom. If only. If only. If it were true, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this paper, I’d be off doing something else. This blog, and others like it, wouldn’t be necessary. If people were having a great time, and the porn represented sexual liberation, this blog would hold links and podcasts and whatever else our boffins could come up with, accessing nothing but porn. If people were being filmed having sex, or trainspotting, or collecting badges, or reading, or doing whatever else turns them on, I wouldn’t be protesting, I’d be cheering! But they’re not. The vast majority of porn is a documentary of survival, of what people have to do to get by, to pay the rent, to get the bank manager or other heavy off their back. Porn is not sexual liberation, it’s not freedom. But it looks like it. We view the photos and films, we masturbate to them, we have an orgasm. That’s sex, isn’t it? By definition, yes. But it’s not sexual freedom, it’s not sexual liberation, it’s not freedom of choice. Not for the people in the films. They are acting. When they smile, they act. When they scream, they may be doing it for real.

I’m told that some people who appear in porn do enjoy it; they do it because for them it is sexual freedom. I say, as I say about when we use the porn ourselves, does that make it OK? Just because I get off on porn, just because some porn stars say they get off on porn, does that justify the existence of the multi-billion currency international porn industry? In fact, never mind the industry, the industry is just a concept, an abstraction, an entity, and I’m not concerned about that. I’m concerned about human beings. Am I justified to expect a whole class of human beings to be set aside as sub-humans to perform for the camera, so that I can exercise my sexual freedom? And the same goes for performers – if I enjoy performing in the industry, or if I make a lot of money (don’t worry, it won’t be for long, once I’ve been in the industry a while they’ll dump me unless I can perform things I’ve not previously performed in public, ie they’ll expect me to ‘progress’ towards things I don’t want to do) am I justified in accepting that a whole section of human beings will be exploited to facilitate my career? Can I profit from the trade in the purchase, sale and use of human beings? I say that sets up a hierarchy, a power differential which puts my needs above someone else’s. Sexual liberation cannot come from the continuation of adherence to hierarchies, attention to status, abuse of power.

Anarchist Bookfair 08 Flyer

Objectification, Exploitation, Capitalism and the Destruction of the Planet (or, You Can’t Eliminate One Hierarchy without Eliminating them All)

This workshop aims to achieve a greater understanding of feminism, and how feminist struggles are not a ‘minority’ interest, but a vital part of the ecological and anti-capitalist movements.

We live in a patriarchy, a hierarchy of men over women. We live in a capitalist society that places man over nature. It is impossible to eliminate one hierarchy while leaving another intact.

We live in a commodified society. Capitalist big business has encroached on almost every aspect of our lives; you can go anywhere in the world and eat the same food, buy same clothes and watch the same TV.

Industrialised sex is encroaching into our personal lives and changing us, altering our sexuality to make us the perfect consumers; never satisfied, never happy.

Pornography eradicates female sexual autonomy and dictates a narrow and limited idea of male sexuality predicated on cruelty coercion and degradation.

There is a libertarian strand to the current leftist movement that says that all sex is good, no matter how cruel, how degrading, how damaging; as long as someone (a man) achieves orgasm, it is unequivocally good. We need to challenge this male supremacism and male entitlement.

Harm done to women and children is being re-pathologised as individual problems resulting from individual ‘bad-choices.’ The systematic oppression of women and children is being ignored.

If we cannot create a society where all human beings are free, then the planet, and all living things on it, are doomed.