It had been a long time coming. In fact, it’s more than ten years since I read Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch and discovered that submitting to sex without desire is not empowering. In fact, feminists should fight for the inalienable right of women to experience sexual freedom the same way men do, free from the straitjacket of a prescriptive male culture that reduces us to things that sex is done to, rather than erotic actors in our own right.
Feminism 101 for you there, kids.
In the intervening years, I witnessed the “Feminist Movement” – which is largely comprised of a collection of academics and affluent commentators – get into bed, literally and figuratively, with every male fantasy posing as a serious news item in the Daily Mail. Pole dancing? It’s hot as hell and a great way to keep fit! Strip clubs? Well, it’s just a financial transaction, innit? Prostitution, obviously, should be legalised. It’s a malaise, suffered particularly on the left, that holds everything even mildly taboo should be legalised in order to achieve logical consistency.
However, the latest craze to hit the sisterhood, and I hold “The Secret Diary of A Call Girl” in part responsible for this, is prostitute porn. This is the phenomenon where so-called sisters pen articles on how they were a high class hooker a few years ago and found it oh-so-liberating, not at all degrading, and anybody of a differing opinion is some sort of weird right wing moraliser.
No, ladies! No! Let’s get one thing clear: selling yourself for sex is already legal. What is being proposed here is that legalisation of soliciting and all the pimping paraphernalia it comes with. Is this what we want? For you, a brief foray into the dark underbelly of high-class whoring in between the planning meeting for the transgender workshop and your nail appointment might have been a bit of a lark. For the fifteen year old who has run away from an abusive home, ended up on the streets and whose pimp-cum-boyfriend has got her on smack as a human resources policy, it’s simply a matter of bleak survival. For you it’s choice. For most, it’s economic determinism, pure and simple. Not that the feminist movement has ever been concerned, from what I can see of their recent “work”, with the experiences of poor women or women from ethnic minorities. I guess it gets in the way of adorning the same old boring slave morality with lip-gloss and nipple tassels in order to titillate a bunch of online knicker-sniffers in the Guardian comment pages.
A couple of months ago, Project Prevention hit the headlines for offering £200 to heroin users in return for undergoing a sterilisation procedure. John, an addict, accepted the money and was duly de-knackered. He “chose” to do this, as much as anybody suffering from a chronically relapsing disease – which is essentially what chaotic heroin addiction is – can choose to do anything. Are people like this really in the same privileged position of the middle-classes who drone on about “choice” as if access to life chances is universal and not determined by factors over which some have little control?
Whilst the feminist movement continues to subscribe to this sort of pathetic behaviour, persists on advocating the submission to sex without desire in order to compete for approval from the sort of men who secretly despise them, disgraced, unsexed John is both their sister and their symbol.
Read Amber Elliott's piece on 'Why I will never be Melanie Phillips' from last week here.
Comments
Hmm / April 18 2011 5:21pm
This doesn't seem to be an argument against prostitution so much as an argument against wage-labour and capitalism. By accepting that "high-class whoring" is just fine, you're conceding that there's nothing inherently wrong about selling your body for sex. Then you say, aha, the reason it's wrong is because poor people don't have many other options. At this point, one wonders where in your argument you make the distinction between a poor prostitute and a poor factory worker. Neither of these individuals have myriad of choices, and arguably both of them are exploited. If we recognise that the latter can legitimately consent to their work, I can't see how we don't say the same of the former.
I'm unsure where I stand on legalisation: all the evidence suggests that a legalised, regulated system would make working conditions safer for those involved. But at the same time, I hold this intangible belief that it *is* more exploitative in some way. However, I still struggle to find a coherent argument for why it isn't a "financial transaction".
Hmm / April 18 2011 5:57pm
This doesn't seem to be an argument against prostitution so much as an argument against wage-labour and capitalism. By accepting that "high-class whoring" is just fine, you're conceding that there's nothing inherently wrong about selling your body for sex. Then you say, aha, the reason it's wrong is because poor people don't have many other options. At this point, one wonders where in your argument you make the distinction between a poor prostitute and a poor factory worker. Neither of these individuals have myriad of choices, and arguably both of them are exploited. If we recognise that the latter can legitimately consent to their work, I can't see how we don't say the same of the former.
I'm unsure where I stand on legalisation: all the evidence suggests that a legalised, regulated system would make working conditions safer for those involved. But at the same time, I hold this intangible belief that it *is* more exploitative in some way. However, I still struggle to find a coherent argument for why it isn't a "financial transaction".
Jill / April 25 2011 2:03pm
Ah, but legalising prostitution would make working conditions safer only for those who could submit to the regulations of it. That is, say legalisation would create regulations, which would protect women from pimps, involve health checks, drug checks, etc... but the most desperate women wouldn't be able to work within those regulations, so this system would actually just undermine the most vulnerable even more, driving them even further underground and pushing their 'wages' down further as they compete with 'legal' whores. Legalisation would only create a two-tier system--legal, regulated prostitutes, and those operating illegally. For this reason, it's not the answer--aside from the fact that I simply don't want to live in a society that legally condones the purchasing of sex. We are better than that. Thanks for the interesting article, Sadie!
Holly / April 29 2011 5:04pm
This would be a much better article if you actually referenced to specific articles you object to instead of just saying that you don't like what feminists stand for these says.
Feminism isn't and never has been a homogenous movement. By lumping the whole of feminism in with its "self appointed Guardian spokeswomen" you so dislike you're doing a major diservice to other strands of feminism and your own journalistic skills.