The myth that it is possible to commodify consent
An extract from Kat Banyard’s new book Pimp State:
The steady creep of “sex work” into 21st-century vernacular is neither incidental nor accidental. The term didn’t just pop up and go viral. The Global Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP), an organisation that openly campaigns for brothel-keeping and pimping to be recognised as legitimate jobs, credits itself as largely responsible for “sex work” replacing “prostitution” as the go-to terminology for institutions such as the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/Aids (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organization (WHO).
“More than mere political correctness,” the NSWP proudly states, “this shift in language had the important effect of moving global understandings of sex work toward a labour framework.”
Oh yeah? Then where are the health and safety regulations? Where is the safety equipment? Where are the sexual harassment classes?
The whole point of the sex industry is that it offers men the chance to buy sexual access to women who do not want to have sex with them – otherwise they wouldn’t have to pay. Masking its fundamental purpose thus becomes the primary PR challenge for the prostitution, pornography and strip club trades if they are to survive – maybe even thrive – in a society that has decided, at least in principle, that women are not subordinate sex objects and rape is a bad thing.
Perhaps the single most effective strategy hit upon so far is to pump out the myth contained in the term “sex work”: the myth that it is possible to commodify consent.
How can sexual consent be a thing that can be bought and sold, yet we can still talk with a straight face about there being such concepts as healthy sexual relationships and meaningful consent? If, while having sex with someone, you feel repulsed by them touching you, afraid of what they might do, degraded and humiliated by the sexual acts, hurt by the hateful words they’re whispering in your ear, sore because he’s the fifth man you’ve had sex with today, exhausted from it all, traumatised, abused – the fact that you’ll get a bit of cash at the end does not change anything. There is no invisible hand in the prostitution market that magically disappears the lived experience of sexual abuse.
And a minority of privileged prostitutes who have a pleasanter lived experience doesn’t change that, any more than a handful of comparatively humane slave-owners made slavery acceptable.
Trades weave themselves into the fabric of society. We know this. We place all kinds of restrictions and prohibitions on markets precisely because of this. Because the risks, particularly to the most vulnerable and marginalised in society, are just too high. Commercial exchanges that people may agree to participate in without a gun being held to their head – such as sales of human organs, voting rights, bonded labour contracts – are nonetheless deemed legally off limits. It’s the line in the sand that societies draw to say that the harm to those directly involved, to third parties, or to the bedrock principles necessary for equal citizenship, is simply too great. Some trades are too toxic to tolerate.
A basic principle that is utterly indispensable to ending violence against women, not to mention to our fundamental concept of humanity, is that sexual abuse is never acceptable. Not even when the perpetrator has some spare cash and the person he’s abusing needs money. Cheerleaders of brothels, porn sets and strip clubs would have us believe that the sex trade levitates above the level of social values and cultural beliefs. But no one can opt out of its effects. A market in sexual exploitation, accepted and tolerated, influences who we all are as individuals, and who we are as a people.
A society that acts in law and language as if men who pay to sexually access women are simply consumers, legitimately availing workers of their services, is a society in deep denial about sexual abuse – and the inequality underpinning it.
•Pimp State: Sex, Money and the Future of Equality by Kat Banyard (Faber & Faber, £12.99). To order a copy for £10.39, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call the Guardian Bookshop on 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
Excellently stated and impossible to refute.
The great genius of the neo-liberalism is that it can commodify anything.
Once there is general acceptance of this philosophy, terms like “sex worker” tend to get a free pass. If you take it as axiomatic that a so-called “free” market enhances the agency of all involved and it might seem draconian to interfere with the “sex market” and take away the agency of all involved.
The arguments advanced for the full decriminalisation of the “sex market” bear a striking resemblance to those advanced in favour of child labour in nineteenth century Britain. We are told “sex work is work like any other work;” I don’t know if any of the defenders of child labour actually said “child labour is labour like any other labour,” but they said plenty of things that suggest they would concur with this idea. Just as it is argued that some women could not survive without prostitution and others became prostitutes out of choice so it was argued that some children could not survive without factory work and others worked out of choice; just as you can find ex-prostitutes who will tell you how liberating their “sex work” had been so you could find adults who looked back fondly at their time working a child in a factory; just as some prostitutes go on the become brothel keepers[1] so some child labourers went on to become factory owners.
It took a lot of struggle to ban child labour. The 1833 Factories Act is often seen as a landmark victory in this struggle but by modern standards it is woefully inadequate,[2] However it is worthy of note that it criminalised factory owners not child labourers, similarly we criminalise slave owners not slaves. There are clear precedents for legislation along the lines of the Nordic model not only working but working well.
But there are other worrying aspects of this. A card-carrying neo-liberal could respond to the claim that “sex work” is cannot be carried out in line with normal health and safety regulations with “So much the worse for health and safety regulations.” Indeed I fail to see how it could become normal work without a substantial dilution of such regulations.
Beware what you inflict on the weakest in society for there are those who would inflict it on you.
Footnotes:
[1] I have heard this fact used as an argument for the legalisation of the “sex market;” after all, if prostitution were so terrible would someone who had experienced it inflict it on others?
[2] It made it illegal to employ children aged under 9 in factories and restricted the hours of those under 13.
[…] a comment by Bernard Hurley on The myth that it is possible to commodify […]
I have another problem with the phrase – it is imprecise.
If you say prostitution you know exactly what you’re talking about. If you say “sex work”, you could be talking about everything from softcore porn to writing erotic fiction, to prostitution.
It works to conflate issues to try and muddy them – to make the whole thing a whole lot harder to see.
It is a bit like “collateral damage”. It could mean killing civilians, it could mean damaging someone’s porch.
It exists as a term so as to leave the issue fuzzy, whereas if we just said “Killing civilians” – the issue becomes a whole lot clearer.
@Bruce Gorton
I agree, and I think that confusion is deliberate. All “sex work” is work, but some really is freely chosen work “like any other work” and some is brutal exploitation. Let’s not conflate them.
It has always been an effort to conflate the trafficked with the trafficker. Kinda like agricultural workers. You get the feeling you are being snowed when you hear them talking about the advantages of their calling but you can’t be sure til you ask.