I’ve seen some very heated debates by leftists on both sides of the argument that have left me very confused.
I’ve always thought sex work is just an umbrella term for work that is sexual in nature. That leaves a lot of room for misinterpreting it, especially when we have “sanctioned” sex work that ranges from criminalized to fully legal.
I’ve seen some really horrid arguments from debate bro leftists that I think spring up from unexamined internalized puritanical beliefs alongside not having actually talked to a swer in real life.
Yeah, everyone (on the left) opposes human trafficking, child sexual exploitation etc. I think they can be safely removed from the “sex work” category because they’re just rape. No one supports it.
How do you deal with the question of sex work being inherently coercive (due to capitalism) and, as coerced sex = rape, thus all sex work is rape?
Obviously, there is a contradiction there as many sex workers choose that profession, and thus either:
A) they are consenting to rape, which is absurd.
B) or coerced sex = rape is not the right label.
I’ve gotten into several arguments with this on here. As someone who has been involved in the past and firmly sides with the “it’s rape” category.
In my experience people currently doing it side with the “it’s not rape” side while people who are out of the industry have much more critical views that more often lean into “yeah it’s pretty fucked up” or like me, “it’s rape”.
I think that people whose current survival relies upon sex work are unreliable judges of its character, their survival being tied to being able to perform it causes them to defend it from all adversity and “it’s rape” it’s definitely an adversity that affects their survival. This is why there is such a significant difference in tone between people currently performing the work vs people who have left that industry behind them.
I don’t think that we look at the proletariat in other work who defend capitalism and say “it’s not coercive and there is nothing wrong with my work” as being correct, we look at them as victims who are riddled with :brainworms: that are incorrectly analysing capitalism’s exploitation of them. I feel this way about sex work also.
Yeah, that’s valid.
Since you brought up the proletariat in general, do you think there should be terminology that is similarly evocative and effecting for all coerced labor under capitalism as we have for coerced sex (ie rape)? Or is there something inherent in sexual labor that separates it from other coercive forms of labor?
Do you think that sex work can exist as non-coercive labor in a socialist society, and therefore not be rape?
the umbrella includes stuff like onlyfans and strippers, so there’s not necessarily sex happening there to be rape.
if you want to focus on johns and prostitutes, i’d explore lines of reasoning like “the customer isn’t the one doing the coercing and the pro-SW position includes being able to turn down clients” or “if you think capitalism coercing sex work is bad that should lower your evaluation of any ‘regular’ job that takes a physical and mental toll on the workers”
I don’t know if this is a useful distinction but in sex work it is the work that is coerced, not the sex. The capitalist system forces you to work or die but it doesn’t care if that work is building houses, flipping burgers or having sex.
Some forms of sex work is obviously rape but it feels wrong to call it rape if say a trained nurse would rather do prostitution than work at a hospital. I recognise that there is a lot of gray area there. At what point does the alternative to sex work become so bad that it is no longer voluntary?
