Sex work

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Yes, and we should stop putting sex on some kind of weird pedestal that it doesn't deserve.

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Really, you guys have given me no reasons to support the legalization of prostitution.

As liberals, are you not concerned with the message it sends to legalize prostitution? It would be to say that it's okay to treat women as sexual instruments. It would send a message that it's okay to think of women as less than human. You guys have actually taken on conservative talking points to argue with me here. Do you not understand how devastating it would be the feminist movement and to leftism to declare in a single voice that women are just sex objects?

This isn't an issue where the libertarian stance of "just legalize it" should be taken, because this isn't an issue of freedom - the freedom to be a prostitute. This is an installment in the ongoing culture wars. This is about protecting the dignity of women, and protecting the right to be considered equally human.

If you have truly legitimate reasons for supporting this, then quit retreating to conservative talking points, like accusing me of "moralistic grandstanding."

The best reason to support the legalization of prostitution is that full-on legalization will bring workers out of the shadows and curb the black market, not to mention make it much easier to regulate the activity to prevent the spread of STIs. WillipsBrighton, who I usually disagree with (!) has been making the argument that sex work should not be viewed as fundamentally different than any other kind of work, and I agree. The only difference between prostitution and pornography, for instance, is the presence of a camera. So you're more or less saying that it's fine to engage in sex for money so long as you can watch? If you wanna talk about creepy, we might should start with that, no? I don't have a problem with pornography (normal) and thus I don't think sex for money should be illegal, because I don't think of sex as some kind of divinely ordained process that must be done behind closed doors, between two loving individuals in a committed relationship, etc, etc.

I'm not a liberal. I'm a communist, but I'm not concerned with 'the message' legalization sends because legalization would mean a step forward for the workers in the industry itself. Sex work being legalized would mean that sex workers are guaranteed a minimum wage and pathways would open up to organize sex workers into unions to improve working conditions and gain more power on the job. That's the message I want to stress when it comes to sex work.

What I get from your (and the other feminists') arguments is that you fundamentally don't think that women are smart enough to make their own decisions, to choose their own line of work, and thus must be protected by an overbearing state. You don't say it in the language of male chauvinism (We must protect womanhood!), but you end at the same avenue via the language of feminism. You implicitly argue that women are weak and in need of protection from the state, but where is your concern about these women when they choose other lines of work? If they decide to work at Walmart or McDonald's, are we supposed to ignore the fact that doing so is also a result of economic coercion? Like WillipsBrighton was saying, under capitalism there is ultimately very little consent when it comes to choosing a job, because the logic of the capitalist system itself dictates that you work or die, and some women make the choice to engage in sex work so they don't have to starve. I respect that choice, and I respect their right to do what they think is best to put food on the table. Is it a crappy job? Probably. All jobs under capitalism are sh**t jobs (unless you're one of the useless parasites that feed off of other peoples' labor), so why should I make a point of condemning her or the man (or woman) who engages in sex for cash?

A lot of us do worse things in our daily lives for money. We sell people products that are expired and may end up causing them to get sick, maybe even die. We build guns and rockets that are used to murder people halfway across the globe. And you're going to sit here and tell me that giving a handjob for $20 is somehow inherently worse than all those things because it involves sex? Talk about not having your priorities straight. The one thing that the feminist pseudo-left and the male chauvinist right have is a lack of perspective, and that's one thing they're never going to be able to overcome because the role they serve in society is that of the guardians of capitalist normalcy. Protect the family, says the male chauvinist! Require written consent for every sexual act, says the feminist! In the end, the goal is the same - regulate reproduction to keep the capitalist system running, even if they don't (and they usually don't) realize it.

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To look at the arguments of the pro-prostitution liberal left is to enter a strange and frankly kind of gross world in which treating sex as an in principle separate sphere of life from employment--surely a novel and incomprehensible distinction to make!--is just one of 'society's hang-ups', consent to sex and consent to employment should be held to directly equivalent standards, and 'sex-negative' is a non-joke concept.

Reality and rationality may seem strange and gross to those living in a moralistic world of delusion and nonsense, yes.

Again somebody has used 'moralistic' as an insult as if caring about right and wrong when making policy is in some way a bad thing. I think this says more than I could.

This. This, so much.

They keep retreating to attacks on feminism. I swear, half the time it seems like I'm debating with conservatives.

TNF's self identification as a "communist" means that he gets to identify as part of the 'far left' even though he's actually on the far right in this debate.

Feminism has always been a petty-bourgeois movement that is most interested in making sure that women have the same opportunity as men to enter that milieu. The fact that feminists have hitched themselves to the Democratic Party and reject even the mildest demands that would actually empower working class and poor women is evidence enough of that. The petty bourgeois feminist is not out demanding free abortion on demand, he or she is instead demanding only a defense of the existing regime on abortion rights, which works well enough for people who have money (who compromise, of course, the vast majority of members of organizations such as NARAL, NOW, etc., etc.).

Genuine Marxism rejects feminism in favor of women's liberation. We don't think that the only women that should have the right to live full fledged lives are those of the petty bourgeoisie and the big bourgeoisie. We demand that women have the right to free abortion on demand and access to things like socialized daycares, laundromats, etc, etc. And most of all, we don't subsume our politics to petty bourgeois moralizing. There are certainly pseudo-Marxists who embrace every bit of the anti-sex, petty bourgeois moralizing that has come out into the open again in the last few decades or so, sure. But they lack an elementary understanding of Marxist theory. One can be for the liberation of women while not subscribing to an ideology that is fundamentally anti-worker at its core (because of its denial of the class struggle and attempts to build a cross-class 'sisterhood' of women that has never and will never exist).

And no, I'm not taking the 'far-right' position on this. That would be male chauvinism. I'm not a male chauvinist, and I find it funny that you can't seem to distinguish between a position that calls for trusting women to make their own decisions about what they do for a living and support for women being chained to the kitchen. You have some real issues with discernment, be it on this issue or your inability to distinguish consensual sexual activity from rape, as was the case in the thread about the father who beat up his son's rapist.

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Saying women should be just sex objects is indeed a horrible view. Luckily, no one is arguing for that here.

Everything DimpledChad says is in bad faith.

How so?

Well, you do keep asking for 'reasons why sex work should be legalized,' and then ignore them whenever someone (like WillipsBrighton, Cory, or myself) provide them.

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Feminism has historically been about as dominated by the middle class as Marxism has been dominated by men... a cross class sisterhood of women is about as likely as a cross nation brother of men... and what of it?

I'm sorry, could you translate this to English for me? Because I can't make heads or tails of it.

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I'm arguing about sex work from a Marxist perspective, so I think it's only right that I qualify my position as such. Again, there's nothing inherently 'right-wing' about anything I'm saying, unless of course, you don't understand what 'right-wing' means. I'm not arguing in favor of male chauvinism or allowing men to control women's bodies. Quite the opposite. You, on the other hand, are arguing for just that, albeit in the form of arguing that women are in need of special protection from the state from 'bad men' who purchase sexual favors for them.

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I'm sorry, have you addressed a single point that I have presented in this thread or any other that I've engaged with you in? Because it seems to me the only thing you're interested in doing is trying to paint me as some kind of reactionary when I expose your position as fundamentally retrograde.

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To clarify my position on this matter -

As long as we live in a capitalist society, I reject attempts by the capitalist state to control consensual (while again realizing that very few things under capitalism are actually 'consensual' in any real sense) sexual activity, no matter the grounds on which they attempt to do so, be they using the frame of family values or feminism. Likewise, I also reject all attempts by the capitalist state to force certain segments of the workforce into a de facto slave market, as that is inevitably the end result of the criminalization of prostitution. On those grounds, I reject the criminalization of sex work in a capitalist society.

As for the society that I'd like to see come into being? The transition from capitalism will inevitably require a total deconstruction of those structures that capitalism leaves behind. These will have a powerful pull in society (ideas such as racism, sexism, etc.) and will be only fully rooted out in economic conditions that allow for their being pulled up from the root. So I have no doubt that sex work, being one of the leftovers from thousands of years of class based society, will stay with us, at least until we are able to fully smash the markers of our time as residents of a class based society. In that case, during the transition period, it will be important to make sure that sex work is done safely and regulated to prevent the spread of disease, ideally through some kind of state-owned (but democratically managed) brothel system. This too would eventually be done away with as the distortions of sexuality engendered by class society melt away, the patriarchical family unit is done away with (as the entirety of women's oppression is centered in their subservient role in the family unit), and production hits a level that allows the state to wither away along with the money and exchange based economy.

Will that end sex work? Maybe it would. I'm not so sure. In a hypothetical communist (that is, post-scarcity) economy, work itself would have minimal importance and would probably vanish altogether. But perhaps a communist society, in guaranteeing all abundance and eliminating privation, might engender new kinds of competitive behaviors, albeit ones not grounded in accumulation. We might end up in a society wherein prestige or respect becomes the 'currency' to be accumulated, and favors might inevitably be traded here or there in that regard involving sex. I can't predict the future. But I can say that if it does survive, the transition to communism will ultimately divorce 'sex work' from its traditional role as a specific kind of slavery known almost only to women, as communism will inevitably deconstruct the gender roles that class society has created over the thousands of years since the Neolithic Revolution.

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Of course the sexist dominated left is circling the wagons in this thread to pat each other on the back, meanwhile studiously avoiding any actual debate or exchange of ideas, whilst at the same time making proposals that would make even the most typical male chauvinist, or jmfcst type, look like a feminist.

It's almost as if you're posting from a different thread.