Sex work will never be feminist

Sex will always be political.

Feminism is going out of style. That is not to say that women’s rights aren’t being fought for. It’s more so that the search for equity between all genders in a formalised manner known as feminism is currently collapsing.

As coherent political reform, feminism is ceasing to matter. Overtaken by the synonymity of media and politics, feminism is now more so a buzzword used by conservatives to label leftists as extremists or a marketing campaign for corporations. As a framework for social change it is redundant and symbolic. Like most revolutions or causes for civil rights, being subsumed into commercial use renders the movement useless. When you make merch out of a political movement, it becomes a subsect of capitalism and no longer a fight against it.

Most feminist rhetorics you see in mainstream media would probably be choice feminism. It is the most digestible and inoffensive form of feminist discourse today because it implies that any choice a woman makes can be feminist on the basis that she is a woman. This makes things that would previously be anti-feminist (or in a grey area) magically become a radical form of reclaiming women’s oppression because she has chosen to do it, regardless of how she got to that conclusion.

This rhetoric has normalised things like plastic surgery. Choice feminism says it’s okay to get plastic surgery if you’re doing it for you, and if you’re being honest about it. Transparency seems to be the line that most people would draw when opposing aesthetic surgery. The idea is that lying about your perfect surgically modified body is bad because it could influence how younger generations perceive themselves. But questioning how you got to the point of getting surgery is not to be questioned. Bodies are privatised but commercially sold. The male gaze isn’t questioned but rather negotiated confidentially and repackaged as defeated.

The same debate is resuscitated in the idea of sex work. Termed as the ‘feminist sex wars’, it refers to the disputes regarding practices like prostitution and pornography. Abolitionist radfems argue that these things constitute as violence against women. The third wave and pro-sex work feminists argue that if a woman chooses to do those things and makes money out of it, it can actually empower women in reclaiming something that was previously used as a means of oppression.

The larger question in all this—one that feminism has been trying to solve for decades—is interrogating whether or not sex work is legitimate. But I think its legitimacy is redundant. Under a capitalistic regime all work that makes profit is legitimate work regardless of ethical boundaries. A more interesting question to pose is whether or not sex work is feminist, and coming from a view that opposes choice feminism, I don’t see how sex work can be fundamentally feminist. It should not be glamourised, romanticised, or encouraged. It’s also not a ‘lower’ form of work, however: to reduce sex workers to just people who have sex for money is wrong. The ‘voluntary’ objectification of oneself does not make them non-human.

Sex work can never be feminist because pornography is inherently anti-feminist. Robin Morgan says that “pornography is the theory, and rape the practice.” As a concept it was created by a patriarchal system to manifest, visualise, and profit off of their objectification of women. Regardless of what form it takes today, it remains the practice of subjugating women to patriarchal violence. Rape can be depicted in pornography without it really being rape—just the representation of it. Explicit violence and non-consensual acts can be recreated for enjoyment and the ethics of it aren’t questioned because it’s an industry that relies on the exploitation of ethics.

Many pro-sex and neoliberal feminists pose the argument that when women choose to make pornography on their own terms it reclaims the terrorism constituted to us. Pornography from conception is fundamentally anti-woman and capitalism justifies this violence. Ultimately you cannot reclaim something that has been anti-woman from the start. To reiterate Audre Lorde’s words: you cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. Why would women choose to reclaim something that would bring us no real social benefit other than monetary gain?

Radfems that are pro-sex work (not abolitionist radfems) are okay with reclaiming pornography as a feminist act of empowerment because they don’t critically interrogate why women are making this choice. Their justification ends at a woman making the decision. In ‘The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism’, Catherine Rottenberg argues that the era we’re in now is known as a postfeminist sensibility in that it responds to the patriarchy through aesthetic influence. To summarise, what this sensibility entails is the idea that femininity is a bodily property; the shift from objectification to subjectification; self-surveillance in the body as subject; individualism, choice and empowerment; the makeover paradigm; and the resurgence of gender essentialism. The main component in an argument against sex work as feminism is the emphasis on individualism, choice and empowerment.

Pro-sex work feminists maintain that sex work in the form of an online platform is justified and safe because it is not sex trafficking and is consensual. The largest facet of their argument is that it’s not prostitution, and that they are in control. Men are not involved in the making of this type of pornography, and so the absence of men makes it feminist. Firstly, to reduce feminism to such a simple rhetoric of man versus woman is to disregard the decades of nuance put forth in historical literature. The argument here is focused on the power dynamics of sex work and that this ‘power’ is now in the hands of the woman making said pornography. Practically and literally, there is a distinct difference in dynamics when sex work is reduced to pixels rather than traditional prostitution, where the violence is overt and tangible. Because of this separation, it’s easy to see how sex work in an online sphere can be liberating and reclaiming. But the standard of patriarchy they are adhering to is not any different—it’s just less obvious because it looks like they’re making a choice to be sex workers to make money.

Ari Kytsya’s comment section

To revisit Rottenberg, this exhibits another facet of her postfeminist sensibility in conjunction with choice and individualism: from being a desired sex object to becoming a desiring sexual subject. Women are objectified as desiring sexual subjects who present themselves in an objectified manner because we ‘want’ to. Disguised in commodification but presented as sexually autonomous, women are seemingly choosing and desiring when, who and how they have sex. The external male gaze hides in the illusion of choice and instead gets internalised as self-policing narcissism. This is the ultimate paradox of neoliberal feminism: we are ‘choosing’ to extend the patriarchy in our feminism. In making everything women do a feminist choice we eradicate the possibility that some of these choices may not be so radical.

Neoliberal feminism says that because sex workers are profiting off of men, and profiting off of a system that once subjugated women, we are then reclaiming sex work. But this justification is an oversimplification of what is really happening. It is also a justification based in a capitalistic framework, which is ontologically tied with the patriarchy and colonialism, both forces that intertwine to be anti-woman. Monetary profit is not a valid salve for a contemporary problem, and it also implies that to profit off a certain demographic of people is to exploit them in some way. Taking money from men does not eliminate the fact that sex work still serves their privilege in an overarching ubiquitous patriarchal system. When women make money in sex work that only ‘exists’ online, they are still making a product to sell to a market. Women are making sexual content to sell to men. Women are using their bodies to make pornography to sell to men. There is no way to reclaim this.

OnlyFans exists within a skeleton of anti-woman and capitalistic principles, buffered and stuffed with choice-feminism propaganda to create an exoskeleton of neoliberalism. When women are making pornography to sell to men, they need to be marketable and make themselves desirable to sell to the male gaze. Which means that they undo everything feminist literature has built, like beauty standards and the reclaiming of sexual autonomy in heterosexual relationships. There are women that advertise themselves as child-like or participate in lesbian sex for a male audience, voluntarily doing damage that is irreparable. Women cannot reclaim sex work as feminist when the act of doing sex work is intrinsically anti-feminist.

To reiterate, this is not an argument against the legitimacy of sex work. People should not stereotype or discriminate sex workers or reduce them to objects incapable of emotions and coherent thought. While I believe sex work to be anti-feminist, it is not illegitimate and it does not justify othering treatment of them. This is also not an argument against sex work as a vulgar action, nor is it an argument that encourages women to be more ‘modest’. It is rather a recognition that the discourse on sex work seems to have disappeared in online and academic spheres, and feminism as a political revolution has ceased to exist. As we see it today there is no revolutionary framework for us to reckon with choice feminism.