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.
Autonomous Radical Feminists 
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March 10, 2010 at 3:18 am
Summerspeaker
I can only think of the scene in the film Libertarias in which female anarchist fighters occupy a brothel and invite the workers to join the struggle.
“El amor debe ser libre, no comprado.” (Love must be free, not bought.)
Anarchist support for the pornography industry and sex work doesn’t make any sense to me. These professions come out of the context of economic inequality.
October 11, 2010 at 3:17 am
Delianth
Interesting. Thank you for this and this blog, because these kinds of things drive me crazy. I can never help but wonder how people think prostitution and pornography would survive in an anarchistic society. Certainly, if there’s no form of capitalism, even barter/trade, that would render the idea of prostitution moot? You’d have sex because you wanted to.
Pornography is a slightly different question, but I don’t think it would survive very well, either. Actors in porn don’t actually like doing it most of the time; I think that it would only come around because the people making it decided to on a whim – introducing huge availability issues, since mass production is largely a result of capitalism and would almost certainly die out without it. Also (and here’s the biggest thing), what’s the draw towards using people and sex like disposable orgasms in an anarchistic society? Sexual obsession just follows sexual repression, and ain’t a single porn user I’ve met been sexually liberated.
I went through Fugitivus the other day and found Harriet’s post on how her friend was a sex worker, and she was trying to reconcile the evils of prostitution with her friend’s choice. And I was just like, “… she’s not a sex worker; she’s privileged.” But I didn’t post, for various reasons.
To me, it’s always seemed like civ and capitalism. I do not, I never want to be the kind of person who looks at something that is horrible for the vast majority of people it touches and then decide, “But it works for me, so it must have opportunities to be okay for everyone.” For some things it’s not like that. For a lot of things? It is.
I don’t really get why my sisters especially will often look at something and see something empowering. Capitalism is soul-draining enough as it is, not just because you sacrifice your time and ability to pursue your passions so that someone else can decide you’re worthy enough to eat and not freeze, but because it stops you from being able to actually be social with other people in a way that’s not constrained by money, rent, time, etc. I don’t see how prostitution isn’t just a deeper violation from that.
Well, I can see it if you can choose it, but again, I get pretty pissed off if the winners try to block out everyone else, waving their arms and shouting, “Hey! No, look! Look at us! This is awesome, see?” We’d be rightfully pissed if a Wall-Street billionaire came out and proclaimed that capitalism worked, I mean look at them!
October 11, 2010 at 3:22 am
Delianth
Oh, and I got here via The missing list via My Fault, I’m Female.
October 13, 2010 at 9:12 am
autonomousradfem
Hello Delianth, and thanks for the interesting comments. The main argument coming from some anarchist men (specifically the ones involved with the workshop at last years ABF), was that some men ‘can’t get laid’, so some women would ‘have’ to be ‘sex workers’; as stated in another post, who, without economic coercion, would ‘choose’ to submit to unwanted sex?
October 13, 2010 at 8:53 pm
Delianth
Oh yeah, I’ve heard and been reading. Really do love the blog, by the way. Been up the wall with how much for granted people seem to take certain oppressions and inequalities. Trying to break their paradigm doesn’t work, either. It’s hilarious how many anarchist men seem to look at an anarchist world the same way capitalists do: it will be the same… even though there’s no reason for that sameness. Just, no one bothers to think about it.
Thus, Black Friday mobs used as an example of why Black Friday-free anarchist societies wouldn’t work. Durrrr.
By definition, in an anarchist society (where one is free to either escape or defend against an attempted violation of one’s rights) unwanted sex would not be submitted to. Ever. And the entire point of wanting an anarchistic society is to eliminate the “necessary” rights violations now present.
Personally, I want to ask them the question: why, without economic coercion, would anyone choose to submit to unwanted sex?
I’m really troubled by the limited definition of rights as only belonging to an individual. The entire capitalist ethos is “oneself, at the expense of others” and I don’t understand how you can think through everything and decide anarchism is best without questioning the basis of the society we have now.
I am admittedly a primitivist, but it seems fairly obvious that something shared collectively also has similarly collective rights distribution. e.g., humans don’t have a particular right to destroy or alter the environment even if they die because of that; the animal inhabitants of the area do have a right to not have their habitat destroyed or taken away, particularly as their survival doesn’t suddenly and severely alter the way that environment functions.
If I’m willing to say that humans can go fuck themselves if they can’t adapt in a non-destructive fashion to their environment, it’s way less of a leap for me to say that you’re not entitled to have sex or be sexually serviced by someone who doesn’t want to fuck you, even if you get blue balls from them enforcing that right.
It seems pretty obvious that you should have the right to have sex with someone who wants to have sex with you, in any and every way that both of you are comfortable with and consenting to. This is different than an individual right, though, because once you involve another person, it’s no longer limited to just you. Pele’s glowing tits, I should not have to explain the concept and limits of “personal choice” to people who are trying to lecture me on why I’m a nasty, man-hating feminazi who is antisex and a stupid twig eater, etc. etc.
My friend and I have been over this before, and we came up with a solution that doesn’t require oppressing, abusing and raping anybody:
If you want to get laid, don’t be a douche1.
…
Too often, anarchists [i.e., anarchist men] take an anarchistic society as an excuse for them to act as horribly as they want and not get punished for it. They always seem to forget that an anarchistic society is not just a society where they don’t have to work. Part of it is that if you’re a jerk, you get kicked out. Or shoved off a cliff into the ocean. This is part of how we keep an anarchistic society from becoming entirely populated by assholes; it’s a permanent solution that has relatively little risk if you’re wrong, since at least you’re not locking someone up for years and years. You do not get to be an asshole just because there are no cops. Hell, part of the point of there being no cops is that self-defense isn’t delegated: you have to defend yourself, but you also get to defend yourself. In general, people are far less likely to be assholes when there’s real consequences to their actions. Like Twisty said, a long time ago, if all women needed to do keep men with from being convicted of rape was sit there and not call the fuzz, men would start being gentlefellows real goddamn fast. What she was saying wasn’t just about rape: it was that, faced with consequences from acting like assholes, men would stop acting like assholes and start trying to not be perceived like assholes.
My comments are way too long.
Anyway, you know, I resent the idea that there’s nothing more to human sexual attraction than contemporary beauty norms. Plenty of people will have sex with you if you aren’t mean to them. But if you’re mean to them, that’s more of a reason to stop you from having sex with other people than it is to force them to have sex with you.
October 13, 2010 at 8:56 pm
Delianth
Oh, and the footnote (I always forget something):
1Douche is entirely appropriate here, because far from being “dirty” by association with a woman’s vagina and/or vulva, douches represent the epitome of meanie-headness since they were invented, designed, marketed and popularized by men, along with the associated mythology that women’s privates are dirty and smelly.
October 19, 2010 at 3:22 am
Summerspeaker
I enjoyed ranting the rant, Delianth. Not too long at all. The sexual entitlement thing never fails to baffle and infuriate me. I think even connecting sex to not being a mean goes too far. That still enables dudes to think they’ve earned it by acting nice (as so many do currently). I’d rather not have any such cultural narratives around. While the result of feminist revolution might well be lots of sex acts (as Firestone suggests), they’ve got to be completely free.
November 13, 2010 at 8:28 pm
Delianth
Oh, yeah. I have no intention of ever saying that “if you’re not overtly mean to people, you’ll get laid in a free society”… quite the opposite. I have a much stricter definition of “not being a jerk” than most people do, which is to say that mine doesn’t include sociopathy.
If you treat other people with basic decency and respect, give two shits about what they’re feeling, and act as though their happiness and comfort matter (especially insofar as you are affecting/effecting those things), chances are that people will want to have sex with you. This is my baseline for not being a bad person; once there, you can work up into being a good person. (Although, being a primitivist, I think that naturally, ideas of “good/bad” are useless and would be replaced with a more useful, horizontally-oriented measure of “you are a person that other people want to be around, you are a good friend, you are a source of happiness for other people.” Especially since we wouldn’t have that bullshit about how some guy can be a rapist but “such a good person!” FYI: body language shows whether you’re trustworthy or not, which is basically why we take such steps to stamp out the recognition of it in civilization.)
But moreso, it just steams my knickers to hear things like “in anarchy, there will be people so ugly that no one will want to have sex with them, so we’ll have to create a class of sexual subordinates to
make those people into bigger sociopathsmake us feel at home, like capitalism’s never leftservice them.” Because here’s the thing:1. If you’re going to argue for pro-civ anarchy, the least you can do is make an argument that doesn’t prove my point more than it does yours. Jeez. Like those guys who rail against lesbian separatists and then turn around and claim that men will never stop raping…
2. I am so tired of people assuming that all this fucked up shit is just, like, innate to humans or something. First because it’s not true; when faced with a choice between biology and culture, your best bet is culture. And mostly because it’s not an excuse. Saying shit like “in anarchy, we’re going to need an underprivileged rape-able class” is basically just putting forward an argument for human extinction on moral terms – the premise determines the conclusion. Turning around and arguing that we shouldn’t kill all humans after that just tells me that you are fucking evil!
3. If I can’t broaden my definition of rape and personal safety boundaries to a point where I am only having sex because I gleefully and enthusiastically want to, then I don’t want your revolution.
Fucking stop reading fucking Marx and start fucking thinking about why you’d need to call it fucking work if you’re not being forced to do it.
And 4. It is a thinly veiled, self-serving excuse from basic decency to argue that human sexuality is based only or primarily off of physical attractiveness.
It’s incredibly sexist and privileged because women have historically been made to bear most of the burden of “look pretty to be considered worthwhile”. WHAT ABOUT TEH MENZ, fuck you, women are still held to a narrower standard of appearance than men; men who do not look like the stereotypically musclebound “menaissance” man (which is being re-popularized by men, I’ll add) are still more likely to be considered on more than their appearance.
It’s also incredibly privileged because it’s primarily men who are saying this, who notably have no empathy or point of empathy to women and thus do not grok the concept that women have not, for a long fucking time (I wouldn’t say never, because most female animals have quite a lot of control over who they’ll have sex with, and that control doesn’t actually go to the guy with the biggest rack), had an equal say in the terms of sex. For a while, women have had little to no say in:
– What kind of sex are we having? (PIV is not exactly the most sensible choice in a species with such a low birth rate, where sexual pleasure is more easily gotten through oral stimulation and where too much PIV will actually lead to UTIs)
– Where and when are we having it?
– What happens before and afterwards?
– What does it mean?
Ignorance of these inequalities is inexcusable in someone who’s even implying himself to be an ally. There is, of course, the other obvious question: if a “sex worker” is engaging in sexual interaction for a reason other than “I really want to”, then what the fuck is “consent” supposed to mean? but the answer is fairly obvious. It’s the same-old-good-ol’-boys’ answer: well, she’s not saying no. In other words, if he benefits, then he’s not going to question the mechanics of how or why he’s benefiting, because to do so may make him a good person, incapable of willfully or passively accruing physical, sexual, social or financial benefits from inequality.
Occasionally you think that certain things go without saying: the sun is warm, fruit is tasty and that the entire baseline ethos of anarchists is that forcing people into doing unnecessary, soul-destroying shit just to survive is wrong. And then you run up against something like this shit and realize that they made the word “manarchists” for a reason, and that all the whining about how IT’S SO OFFENSIVE just proves the point: manarchists think that “manarchists” is offensive, but not blithely asserting that anarchy will make all social inequality will magically disappear, even though the infrastructure that created that inequality will remain. Well, except for animals – after all, the entire point of social justice is that everyone deserves basic decency and kindness regardless of arbitrary value judgments like being able to play musical instruments or skin color, unless they’re that group, because everyone knows they aren’t intelligent and abstract and unemotional and masculinist and moral like us. You know, unlike every other oppressed group in history until we found out we were full of shit.
It just seems incredibly blatant to me, you know – reinforcing the premise that human sexuality runs primarily off contemporary beauty norms gives them an excuse to force conventionally beautiful people to submit to them, but it also gives them an out. They’re not assholes who no one in their right mind would allow near their naked body; they’re just discriminated against by
the patriarchy that is simultaneously benefiting them*sniff*, human nature! Evolution! Biology! DNA! Darwin says so!!!! Obviously, to make things equal again, they should be allowed to exploit other people! Just like whatshisface Cleaver raped women, black and white, to get his own back against white men. Women aren’t really people after all – they’re just pawns in a power game between the real people, men!I seriously can’t believe people will claim women have power over men on the basis of sex when it’s clear that they view sex as a commodity belonging to other men, which they must take/overtake from them.
I think a feminist revolution will result in a lot of sex acts (for one thing, freedom and trust is an aphrodisiac), but they will be radically different than what we see here. I mean… we’re a sexual species; that’s how we give each other pleasure, and our ridiculously low implantation/birth rate only reinforces that. Cats give each other pleasure through grooming each other; we have sex. I’m pretty sure the two species are equal in intensity, too.
I just can’t understand why anarchist men refuse to break out of the paradigm we have now. Sex, with as emotional and complex and intimate as it is, cannot be reduced to hip-waist ratios or having the facial features of a toddler. What is wrong with them, that they are not able or willing to accept that if you love someone, or find them funny, or trust them, they will be beautiful to you? For people that supposedly believe in the inherent ability of humans to not be so cruel and screwed up and awful that we have to be reined in with cruel and screwed up and awful social structures and hierarchies and governments, they display a remarkable lack of scope or imagination when it comes to something as conceivably awesome as sex.
So I reiterate to these guys: if no one wants to have sex with you, it might not be that you’re particularly ugly; you’re probably just a douche.
November 17, 2010 at 12:35 pm
autonomousradfem
Delianth, brilliant! Thank you!