Rethinking Work: sex work as labor

This is the first in Sarah Jaffe’s series, Rethinking Work. See her introduction for more information.

When rethinking work and what we consider work, many jobs that come to mind. Yet few are as fraught with tension and debate as sex work. Having sex, simulating sex, or implying sex for money is denigrated, threatened, questioned by the puritan Right and supposedly radical feminists alike, and yet so often the debate misses the point entirely.

Sure, sex work isn’t a job that most people dream of having. Neither is domestic labor, working at McDonald’s, being a waitress, or even being a secretary. Yet no one feels the need to write screeds about how degrading it is to humanity, or more often women, that people are forced to do those jobs.

I’m not the first person to say such a thing. No one ever wanted to save me from being a waitress the way they wanted to save my best friend from being a stripper.

So what does the difference boil down to? The sex, of course. The opposition to sex work stems from the same kind of purity myth that tells young women that if they have sex before marriage, they have nothing to offer their husband on their wedding night. The idea that you ARE your body, espoused in the phrase “selling yourself,” is what makes people blanch at the idea that sex work might just be another valid way to make a living.

I’m not getting metaphysical here—I want to stay in the materialist realm. So instead of talking about the soul or some higher plane, let’s interrogate for a moment the “selling your body” idea. After all, selling your body is what all of us who do wage labor do: we sell our bodies, our ability to work. Rather, we rent them out for a time. Sex work involves different body parts than most wage labor, most of the time, but where the concept splits gets a bit murky. Is it genitalia? Nudity? Bodies are just bodies, right? Is the construction worker’s job more degrading if he strips off his shirt in the summer heat and people ogle him walking by?

Amanda W. at Three Rivers Blog wrote:

I think there is also an element of classism: if mid-to-upper-class women were to admit that Mickey D’s and maid service are just as degrading, they have to admit that it’s something they’re a part of. If McD’s is just as degrading, it’s degrading because the pay is such shit and the working conditions are so bad. If it’s degrading in that way, it’s because higher-class people don’t care enough to make it any better (because they are the ones with the power to do so). Therefore, if McD’s is just as degrading as sex work, it’s because of them.

If we’re talking about labor, we have to talk about class. And to talk about class means to talk about who’s doing the exploiting. As Amanda points out, it’s easy for middle-class feminists to critique sex work because they’re essentially critiquing the sex—not the work. To talk about the work part means to talk about fair pay and fair treatment and general working conditions. So instead, we make it about the sex, and thus we get people making arguments that purport to be feminist that are essentially policing women’s sexual choices and practices.

Many of us could never imagine doing sex work because we consider sexuality something intimate, yet there are plenty of intimate services that we do pay for. Blogger Mae Callen wrote about her experience at a spa and how it opened her eyes to the possibilities of sex work as a respected, socially-sanctioned thing:

Obviously the life and industry of sex-work and sex-trafficking are complex and I know so very little about them. But I do understand the spa, and in my mind, they shouldn’t be so different.

Nico Little, through whose blog I found Callen’s piece, also points out the work of a vaginal physiotherapist is considered real work, even therapeutic work. And that’s not even mentioning the gynecologist. So if genitalia isn’t the line—and hell, isn’t focusing on genital sex rather heteronormative of us? Ableist, too?–what is? Where’s the moment in which our intimacy triggers are flipped and we say “No, that’s something you shouldn’t pay for?”

You just knew I was going to get to the commodification-of-everything part, right? Well, here goes. We live in a capitalist society, no matter what the wingnuts with the “Obama’s a socialist” signs want to tell us here in the U.S. Capitalism not only requires one to sell one’s labor for wages, it has created a system in which nearly everything is a commodity. It wasn’t sex workers—who were around for ages before capitalism came into existence—who created the idea of bodies as commodities. When we ended officially-sanctioned slavery, we traded it for a system in which one trades one’s work for money.

The world accepts this—even those of us who’d like to see a better system have to live under the one we’ve got, and we’ve got to eat. We’ve accepted that slavery is wrong, but that you have to work to be able to buy food, shelter, and the millions of consumer goods we can’t live without. After years of labor struggles, we’ve accepted that there are certain regulations in place on working conditions. Lack of enforcement, weak regulations, and shifting jobs to countries with lax labor protections aside, these represent a moral acceptance by society that you cannot treat people worse than a certain minimum.

Yet many of the examples that those opposed to sex work give when they talk about how terrible sex work is are examples of lousy and occasionally horrific working conditions, not sex work itself. If one was kidnapped and forced across a border, kept prisoner and forced to clean toilets all day, it would be slavery. It would be repellent. It happens. And yet we think that cleaning toilets for a living is a perfectly fine job. I’ve cleaned toilets for minimum wage. My middle-class parents thought it was good for me as a teenager to do real work. (I doubt the reaction would’ve been the same if I was a teen sex worker.)

What’s repellent in sex trafficking is the trafficking. The slavery. If the argument against sex work is that women are exploited, pressured into doing things they don’t want to do, that’s an argument against exploitation—and as Amanda W. pointed out, it’s an argument against many different forms of work. Extrapolated further, it could be an argument against capitalism. But most opponents of sex work don’t actually want to critique capitalism, so they freely switch between an argument based on labor and an argument based on puritanism. Sex work will dull your ability to enjoy sex with someone you love! Porn makes men beasts! But aren’t those entirely too close to the arguments against premarital sex in general?

For the puritan Right, of course, there’s no contradiction there—they want to control sexuality and particularly women’s sexuality. But for feminists?

If sex work is oppressive it is oppressive to the extent that it is not a choice, like any other job. It is oppressive if it is not freely chosen, fairly compensated, and respected by the rest of society. I want for sex workers what I want for everyone: good working conditions, fair compensation, and most importantly, for that work to be work they have chosen and that they enjoy.