I’ve been thinking about this for a while and I’m curious what others think. Some people argue that sex work gives women autonomy over their own bodies, their income, and their sexuality — that it can be empowering, liberating, and even feminist.
Others say it’s the opposite: that it reinforces objectification, exploitation, and unrealistic power dynamics, and that it ultimately harms women and the feminist movement by turning empowerment into a commodity.
So I’m wondering — where do you stand? Do you think sex work for women is empowering and liberating, or do you think it’s destructive and demoralizing for women and the feminist cause in general?
It’s time for me to invoke 无.¹
“Empowering” is a very dumb term for any kind of employment, I think. In an ideal world, sex work is a job. It is no more or less “empowering” than, say, being a coal miner. Given that framing, look at these questions and ask yourself why asking about another form of employment isn’t as silly.
I generally don’t find jobs intrinsically “empowering”. They’re things we do to make money so we can fulfil that powerful need to eat, have a place to sleep, and collect books. (What!? BOOKS ARE A POWERFUL NEED FOR ME!)
Now of course this is presupposing an ideal world, as I said. And increasingly we’re approaching that world. The more traditional forms of sex work, with subtle or not-so-subtle coercion are not “empowering” nor are they even remotely moral. This thing with pimps or trafficking or whatnot needs to be fought tooth and nail. But when you get into things like people opening OnlyFans channels (that they run themselves, not the OnlyFans farms, that’s the pimping thing), or women working together to make a porn studio with women writers, directors, etc. I see no particular need to frame employment as “empowering”.
At about this point someone will object with how “degrading” or “damaging” (physically and psychologically) sex work is. But there’s a reason why I cited “gold miner” above. Gold miners are disproportionately prone to being killed on the job, and the very nature of their work destroys their bodies over time. Yet somehow I’ve never seen the people who talk about the physical threats to well-being and health that sex work contains object to gold mining as a profession for those reasons. And for psychological damage, consider anybody working in child care services, police work (especially homicide or “special victims”), or any other such field where there’s daily risk of high-intensity PTSD fodder. Again, opponents of sex work on psychological health grounds are generally stumm on these others.
Is it destructive to feminism? That very much depends on your flavour of feminism. The second generation of sex-negative feminists … well, yes, sex work (the ethical kind) is definitely destructive to it. But I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. Second generation feminism’s refusal to deal with intersectional issues (including sex work) is why the National Action Committee died a slow and painful death in Canada, for example. Maybe it’s time to leave that generation behind?
I don’t see (ethical) sex work to be any particular threat to modern, more sex-positive feminism. We’re not quite there at the ethical front yet, but it’s a goal I seriously think we should be aiming for.
UNethical sex work, of course, needs to DIAF and is harmful to all concerned outside of those controlling the sex workers and customers to rake in cash.
¹ This means “not” in English, but with a lot more subtle shades of meaning. In this context it’s the Chan/Zen Buddhist stock answer to a poorly formulated question. It effectively “unasks” the question and demands the interrogator formulate a better one.