Sex Work : Melbourne Indymedia

Two of the most rotten things about capitalism are the way it forces us to do things we wouldn't want to do unless we needed the money and the way everything is turned into a commodity. Moralism and puritanism are politically useless when discussing the question of prostitution because they are ultimately disempowering to sex workers.

Organisations like The Scarlet Alliance are tremendously important and there's nowhere near enough of this kind of organising. These groups work at the coal face of the sex industry to improve the conditions sex workers and give them a sense of their own worth and strength. In many ways these groups are like the trade unions you would find in conventional industries. In other ways, they go beyond what normal unions do because of the nature of the sex industry.

So should we adopt a lasse faire attitude to sex work? Is it the same as any other kind of manual labor, but instead of using your hands you’re using your sex organs? I don’t think so, because while it might be appealing to some to look at it in dry economic terms, the politics of sex work are in some ways far more complicated. The often brutal realities faced by countless sex workers around the world demand that we look at it more seriously. In prosperous Australia, many sex workers face abuses on a daily basis that you don’t commonly find in your typical work environments, especially if they work on the street. Most workers don’t risk dying from AIDS. Most of us don’t have to worry about being beaten or possibly killed by customers.

Decriminalisation/legalisation of drugs and prostitution is a good idea, not because these are great things, but because they have an umbilical link to the fucked up social relations that flow from capitalism - abuse, sexism, racism, alienation. Decriminalisation is worth supporting so that people have access to health care, aren't harassed by the cops or screwed over by pimps and dealers. With prostitution, it also makes it easier for sex workers to organise better for safer conditions and pay.

Prostitution is not the cause of women's oppression. But it's true to say that women's oppression has played a massive historical role in prostitution. You don’t have to look at extreme examples of sexual slavery to observe this -- it’s present in the most "high class" brothels on the planet. The women who work in them are treated as objects just as the streetwalkers are working in the shadows of some stinking laneway. Some women feel this feeds their sense of self-worth because they’ve internalised the logic of capitalism. If this man pays $1000 dollars to sleep with me I must really be worth something. As for women who are supposed to love the lifestyle, the myth of the happy hooker persists to this day, but if there is one that genuinely fits into this category there are a million who are only doing because they feel that this is the last option, their only way of scoring a hit or a way of trying to get back on their feet.

The thing is, capitalism gives us contradictory messages about what it is supposed to mean to be a woman. On the one hand, you're supposed to be an angelic, nurturing figure and on the other hand your supposed to be a steaming hot sex goddess. In the sex industry, this often translates into the myth of the happy prostitute. And kids are sexualised at a younger age now. It's not our natural human inclinations that push us in this direction. It's the cynical marketing of sleazy advertisers who want to steal your kid's pocket money. I want to see how human sexuality would develop if nobody was forced to sell sex to survive and capitalism didn’t sell us unrealistic illusions of what is meant to be desirable. Then we can really be sexually free.