Sex work, feminism & anarchism – notes on the debate

Over the weekend Justice Minister Alan Shatter published a document outlining four possible positions that state may take with regards to sex work which run all the way from complete criminalization to decriminalization. Both feminists and anarchists are quite divided on the question of sex work, the publication of the report at the weekend has pushed me to blog these notes which started as comments on a discussion on Facebook a few weeks back. What follows is rather incomplete and at times incoherent – really just notes I may return to in the future then a particularly strong argument for decriminalization although its clear that is the position I lean towards.

Over the weekend Justice Minister Alan Shatter published a document outlining four possible positions that state may take with regards to sex work which run all the way from complete criminalization to decriminalization. Both feminists and anarchists are quite divided on the question of sex work, the publication of the report at the weekend has pushed me to blog these notes which started as comments on a discussion on Facebook a few weeks back. What follows is rather incomplete and at times incoherent – really just notes I may return to in the future then a particularly strong argument for decriminalization although its clear that is the position I lean towards.

In terms of the debate between the two positions on sex work a lot of value seems to be placed on anecdotal evidence – perhaps in part because the fight is so much about legislation and thus getting useful material into the media to influence opinion. This can be hard to argue against beyond pointing out that such anecdotes are a legitimate but individual perspective based on a set of experiences which may be common but are not universal. We can say that because for every story on one side you’ll find other pieces making the opposite case on the other. Unless you are inclined to write off everything which has another perspective as either lying or delusional this means the conversation needs to be a whole lot less sweeping.

A problem with the debate in general is that both sides tend to try and treat anecdotal personal experience as universal while accusing the other side of doing the same. This may not simply be bad faith but also a reflection of the very different perspectives and expectations people have about sex in general.  The same intensity is found around feminist debates around BDSM where no exchange of money is involved.  I recently sat through one informal exchange of views on the topic where the statement ‘no women would enjoy..’ was answered with an obviously unexpected ‘well actually I think I’d be quite turned on by ..".

In Ireland feminists have been going though one of those intense arguments about the nature of sex work at the moment with rival ‘turn off the red/blue light’ campaigns arguing for and against the criminalization of sex worker clients & workplaces (brothels). Some of this has been pretty heated. The Irish Feminist Network had a conference a few weekends back which one participant described to me as ‘being a load of older academic feminists lecturing us on sex work and shutting down any opposing point of view.’ What has struck me about the debate is the lack of tolerance for the opposing point of view, the IFN weekend event wasn’t the first I heard described in such terms.

I am wary of attempts to shut down one or the other side of that debate as illegitimate and the corresponding suggestion that there is only one feminist / progressive viewpoint on the question. This is very clearly not the case as I’ve known many feminists & anarchists (pro, anti, google for more)  who hold radically different perspectives including quite a few who worked or are working in the sex industry. I’d actually be somewhere in the shades of gray between the ‘turn off the red / blue‘ light debate as while I think sex work is indeed ‘just’ another form of work I also think not all forms of work are anything like equal. Even in terms of the catch all term ‘sex work’ there is a huge gap between staffing a sex-line and working on the streets – I use the rather awkward term prostitute in a good chunk of the rest of the discussion as I don’t think it makes sense to erase this distinction in all discussions around the issue.  If a friend told me they were going to become a prostitute / soldier / medical guinea pig I’d almost certainly try and tell them why I thought that was a bad idea which I probably wouldn’t if they were telling me they were getting a job in Starbucks or staffing a sex-line.

With most jobs it’s the illusion that we have a choice which distinguishes wage labour under capitalism from serfdom or slavery. Supposedly we make a free choice to sell out labour to a corporation, yet even in Ireland which has a reasonable social welfare system is that really a choice. For most of us choosing not to work places enormous limits on what we can do with out lives. And a large segment of the world’s population lives in places where being unable to find work can result in starvation and death. In that context all workers involves coercion through our economic circumstances but its not immediately visible, in particular when you talk about doing a particular job rather than working in general .

What makes sex work (and the military) different is that the underlying coercion and dangers involved in the work are very much more visible than for someone working in Starbucks. This is a key point of the Turn off the Red Light anti sex-work campaign, or as they put it "Very few women choose to willingly engage in prostitution. Most who are involved have had very few real choices." The counter argument to this is that, leaving aside the economic coercion that is found with every job, that the additional coercion is a product of illegality. There is some considerable truth to that, in particular when you also figure in the role migration controls play in making migrants dependent on gangsters. Again this dependency is also found in other areas of work – the Irish state’s policy of trying many types of migrant work visa’s to a job with a particular employed leaves those worker also at the mercy of that employer. In a sense the sex work debate comes down to whether you consider there to be something worse about a job that requires you to allow others to physically access your body in the manner of a prostitute (or medical guinea pig).

I’d this conversation a while back with a very sex work positive friend who was inclined to recognize no distinction in the awfulness of work. I asked her what prostitution would look like in a communist society (i.e. one where there was no money). That’s not such a hard question to ask about teaching or medical care but I think when you ask it in relation to prostitution the extra pressures of economic compulsion come into focus in a clearer way. Without the economic pressures would there be anything that even vaguely resembled prostitution as it is today or like prisons or the police would whatever elements of those roles that existed in a free society be so different as to make our old terms for them useless. Human sexuality if very varied and complex and there is a clear danger of making assumptions about how things might work in the future based around assumptions of what is normal or acceptable now.

The soldier / prostitute pairing I’ve used a few times here comes from a ‘what is anarchism’ talk I did a while back where I was explaining how unnatural class society was – its only been around for maybe 5% of human history. From that "The sort of society we think of today as the product of inevitable ‘human nature’ is in fact the product of thousands of years of highly organized warfare and brutality. The two oldest careers are considered to be those of the solider and the prostitute, the one based on murdering to enforce difference of wealth and power, both based on the requirement to sell your body in order to survive. "

I’m nothing like properly up on theoretical analysis around this but at least in that context the emergence of class society is the emergence of patriarchy and vice versa. Class, patriarchy, the solider and the prostitute all seem to have emerged at the same pre-historical moment and with all four in a relationship which requires/creates the existence of each of the others. I read Debt The First 5000 Years recently and one related thing I took from that in regards to the sex work discussion is the relationship between the solider and the existence of currency, something that is also almost a requirement for prostitution in the street walker / brothel sense. For a lot of history people traded on credit rather than through constantly exchanging some form of currency. Currency tended to be required for times of war to support armies and to in turn be created through warfare and the seizure of temple treasures etc to manufacture coinage.

I think there is a general failure to recognize that work in general covers a wide spectrum from the ‘its a drag but it pays the bills’ to the truly awful. Again the soldier (a role even more historically gendered then the prostitute) is another job that involves giving your body to others in return for cash and taking risks and doing things that many would find distasteful as part of that work. The same can be said for medical guinea pigs but this is also a large swathe of the true reality of work for many on the planet today. Kids recycling electronics in Africa, co-op miners in Bolivia, bonded workers in India, drug mules and street soldiers in Central America are all modern realities of work that offer as little real choice (and in some cases less) than prostitution. Many shade over into and are found alongside prostitution and the informal armies of gangsters.

The abolition of any of these forms of work is really the question of the abolition of the forces that create such work. Which brings us full circle to the invention of class, patriarchy, the solider and the prostitute at the start of what we consider to be civilization. A relationship so old that it seems certain the abolition of any one requires the abolition of all four. With all forms of wage work the force that creates the need to work is poverty, the abolition of that work can only become a reality through the abolition of poverty. I generally don’t like ‘One solution, revolution’ answers to these sort of questions, can anything useful be said in the short term.

I don’t see a positive outcome from short terms measures of criminalization. This seems a broadly similar strategy as the ‘war on drugs’ with the same problems and indeed many of the same arguments made. On the one hand its a war that has no end because you can no more defeat the demand for sex than that for drugs. On the other by making the transactions involved illegal you drive sex workers into dark corners where they are subject to much greater dangers with fewer avenues of escape. This remains true even if you only target the clients of sex workers as in order to find work sex workers will have to then go where their clients can be less visible. As as with the drug war increasing the level of illegality well increase the tendency of those making a living from the trade to be violent gangsters.

In terms of a short term program I’d suggest the following points for discussion
– laws that make it easy to trap migrant women should be abolished – chief amongst those are laws that allow such women to be deported if they are discovered / reported / seek help.
– targeting clients can be made to sound progressive but is counter productive for the reasons explained above and even the progressive spin to it makes a lot of assumptions about what ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’ sexuality is about.
– rape & physical assault are illegal. The legal weakness that needs to be tackled is in the investigation and prosecution of these offences. This weakness is by no means restricted to sex work.
– alongside migrant status poverty is the major element that coerces people into sex work, no one should be forced into any type of work simply to get by – everyone should be able to access some sort of basic income
– sex workers should be able to openly organize into unions to regulate their own workplaces and expose corrupt and criminal employers – as with all other areas of work workers self organisation is the most effective way of ensuring abuse is brought into the open

As I say at the start this is incomplete and at times incoherent even for one of my blog posts, to the point where I am somewhat uncomfortable hitting publish.  Ruthless critiicism or development of anything suggested here in the comments section below is very welcome.

(Late addition: Just after posted this I remembered this interview I recorded with Christa, an anarchist, anti-capitalist & sex worker who I stayed with in Olympia during my US speaking tour in 2008.  Much of the interview concerns general local activism but we talk about sex work from 10 minutes on)