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I knew someone who embodied this confusion, from a very generic middle-class Western background. She was very excited to do "Slut Walks", but she was worried that they were being appropriated by "actually slutty women" i.e. strippers, prostitutes, pornstars etc., and she's opposed to the sex industry in all its forms. Her ethos was basically that sex workers should never be judged negatively (at least if women or gay) but also that their industries should be abolished.
It’s kind of comical, actually. Average liberal feminist women seemingly believe that “sex work” is real work and should carry zero shame and no woman should be disadvantaged or discriminated in any way for engaging in it, should be legal etc., but at the same time society should not normalize it in any way i.e. there should never anywhere be even a hint of social expectation of unemployed or cash-strapped young women engaging in sex work. For example, if you’re some fat, sleazy, hairy, balding landlord, the idea of asking that unfortunate young college student barista renter who’s 2 months behind payment to pay off her debt in the form of blowjobs and sex should not even begin to enter your brain, because if it does, this evil society failed her.
All of this makes zero sense, of course. And let’s not even mention that sex work, by definition, is, you know, work, i.e. something you do even if you hate doing it, because you need the money. Also, it gets taxed. I wonder how many of these feminist culture warriors actually thought this through.
I think a lot of people on the left have a power model of sexual agency (and agency in general, e.g. low wage work) which is extremely dangerous, because there's no way to translate a power model into a predictable legal system, in the same way that e.g. a classical liberal or (Abrahamic) religious conservative model can be predictable. Classical liberalism: people have freedom and responsibility, outside of some explicitly demarcated boundaries. Abrahamic religions provide a textual basis for law that can be either consulted directly by the literate, or at least (in a functioning Abrahamic society) there is probably a set group of widely respected interpreters (priests, ministers, imams, rabbis etc.) whose advice is a reliable guide to what is acceptable behaviour, even if you (or they) don't know the whole system of laws.
In turn, this inherent unpredictability of power models of agency transfers huge power onto those social forces with the authority to determine what power relations make interactions "exploitative" or "not real choices", as well as who gets victim status and its perks. A cheap but clear example of this chaotic authoritarianism is given by the handling by the MeToo movement of sexual assault accusations against Brett Kavanaugh vs. those against Joe Biden: there was no predictable and explicit principle, so what you end up with is trial-by-media of a partisan and special-pleading sort.
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An uncharitable assumption, but I think the easiest way of cutting this Gordian Knot is to presume that certain women, straight, lesbian, or otherwise, are fine with performing/acting sexually at/with other women. So long as no men are involved in the production of the act or the consumption thereof, there will be no contradiction.
Or, alternatively, women do like the idea as a high concept, just not so much the actual implementation thereof.
I'm pretty sure that female sex workers servicing other women exclusively don't actually exist.
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Contrast the total lack of sympathy scabs got despite the fact that they were just trying to scrape by.
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None of the allegedly contradictory statements you quoted are actually contradictory.
Well, either society normalizes a trade, in which case it carries no stigma or shame, or doesn't, in which case it does. I'd say it's that simple.
Not really, no. The stigma has at least two types, and a society (we'll assume a monolith society for maximum simplicity) can stigmatize both, one, or neither.
One kind of a "stigmatized practitioner" is shunned because he is seen as if he unduly extracts value from society as a whole, particular strata or random victims. Examples: street thug, politician, john, pimp, top 0.001% OF model, business owner.
You shun those from a position of morality, good-thinking and justice. At the same time, you recognize that those people are better off in some way, even if you try to sour grapes it.
The second kind of a stigmatized practitioner is shunned (or at least, their job/patronage is) because it is seen as viscerally, materially disadvantageous for himself. Examples: beggar, hermit, retail clerk, street sweeper, common prostitute, alcoholic barfly, OF whale.
Those people are either looked down on or pitied, but very rarely envied. Those who think of those people with disdain use the stigma on the field as a weapon against the practitioners (while often being fine with perpetuating/patronizing the trade itself, like those who eat at mcdonalds and still believe mcdonalds is not a real job for real people), while those who pity them weaponize the stigma against the field (which usually has type 1 beneficiaries, to boot).
Regardless of how you feel about individual participants or whether you are one, it is not incoherent to stigmatize the trade as a whole. It does not "make zero sense" for women to want to end sex work in its current iteration (which they see as mostly exploitative of women) while minimizing collateral to type 2 sex workers. That you don't empathize, or perhaps see ending sex work or ending the stigma against sex workers as against your interests, doesn't make it illogical.
Wait retail clerk and prostitute are equally shunned? I feel so out-of-touch.
Who said equally? I said that they are. Have you never heard anyone sneer at unskilled menial/service labor and insinuate that to stay at such a job for too long (or at all, in some cases) is a failure of living life? The way customers treat them, or the way approximately no one ever in the history of the earth wanted to work in retail if they had a choice?
I have heard people sneer as you say. This does not mean I agree with them. I worked retail for years when in school, I waited tables, I was a clerk at a gas station/convenience store, I was a bartender, I once was a floor waxer, I used one of those blowers to clean leaves, I have done all manner of such work. Some of the most interesting human interactions I've ever had were in such jobs. As far as I'm concerned these jobs constitute honest labor, and, as my dad would have said, build character--I do not feel similarly about barflies, beggars, or (common?) prostitutes. I found it jarring that you lumped them together. You may of course disagree and that's fine.
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The more snobbish PMC types might sneer at retail jobs in general, but a girl who works part-time at Target while she goes to college isn't going to get anywhere near the kind of lasting stigma her classmate with an OnlyFans is going to get.
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The myth of hypoagency rears its head again. Women are always victims: they might end up being part of something worthy of condemnation, but it's always because men forced them to as part of a plot to subjugate women. They're hapless objects who aren't capable of meaningful agency.
Popular feminism is infested with this ideology, which manages to be deeply sexist and reductive against both men and women.
Yes, it's a strange yet common view, where women are both inert objects AND people whose autonomous choices regarding abortion, adultery, prostitution etc. are sacred.
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It’s not a myth. Women really do have less agency than men, and less ability to do things like resist pressure to do stupid things or go against the crowd.
Yes, we should stop pretending they have agency in other areas, too. But acknowledging that a large percentage of female sex workers do not actually want to be there and that sex work is inherently more prone to exploitation than other shitty low wage jobs for this exact reason isn’t wrong.
There are plenty of people who hate literally every job out there, but like Stuff. Depending on how expensive the Stuff you want is, you compromise more of yourself. Women don't like selling themselves, but if they didn't like Stuff so much they could just pick up a shift at the macs I literally see 'Now Hiring' every macs in every country I go to.
Pop feminisms influence on the concept of selling sex is adequately examined by others in this thread, but given my own (relatively extensive by this boards standardsl) experience with hookers, there is extremely little evidence of them lacking agency or awareness. Barring the women exploitated by Moroccans/Turk johnnys in Amsterdam/Denmark and the weird shit for western slavs, most working girls seem to by exercising an excessive amount of agency. At least here in Asia they have large freedom in changing managers, are literally on a high-take commission structure, and are freely able to reject clients (Indians are effectively banned from Singaporean brothels, for example, and no one gives a shit about the racism).
The dark side of the focus on OF parasites and escorts is that the real threat of female sexual exploitation is relatively unnoticed. Girls in debt and forced into prostitution are rarely streetwalkers, they are children whose shitty parents pimp them out in their private shitholes and bring in johns via darknet meetups (strictly speaking the girl is not the one in debt, but their shithead family instead).
This is a real vector of abuse that is extant and is being addressed, but I strongly suspect that the invective against sex work while hailing it as simultaneously feminist is simply due to it being another tool in the 'MEN BAD' bag. Pedos are already castigated and hunted, so theres no value in propping up the plight of these kids.
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