Flick Harrison on Sat, 11 Feb 2012 02:24:59 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> Sex Work and Consent at @transmediale |
When I hear the word "sex trade worker" I'm reminded of the phrase "collateral damage." Cleaning up the language doesn't change the situation. If the word "prostitute" hurts your feelings - it SHOULD. It's humiliating work. I agree that it's master-slave, and that's what the customer is buying - power over another person. The people who pay for expensive prostitutes - the jet-set clientele - are exactly the class of people that should disappear. I don't know if we should facilitate their master status by legalizing prostitution and encouraging an open market. I mean, really: http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/04/08/jaffers-friends-in-low-places/ This attempt to dignify sex work is well-intentioned and sometimes positive. Bridgette Bardot was hardly a slave, but did she provide a meaningful contribution to society? I certainly enjoy contemplating her red-hot persona, but does this "benefit" outweigh the gender roles which her work reinforced? Was her work consensual, or were her options more limited than a man's? Other sexy-workers (eg Anna Nicole Smith) have had a harder time surviving their role, of course. Then again, Playboy smashed open doors for women by giving them good paycheques and career paths that threw the barefoot-and-pregnant social order into a tailspin. It also helped undermine conservative support for full-spectrum sexual repression, a development which continues to weaken them overall. http://www.torontosun.com/2012/02/01/is-the-cbc-paying-for-porn Morlock, your comment is pithy, but it's a bullshit comparison. Just because it sounds good doesn't mean it's true. Access to the body is much more intimate than access to the brain. Think about how desperate your economic situation would be before you let someone - a stranger, bad breath, rude manners etc - penetrate your butt with their cock. I don't know what you do for a living, but picture your average client / co-worker / customer and imagine you have to have sex with them. All of them. Now think how hard-up you'd be before wasting the same hour writing a lame paper or article. Hell, you write here all the time - giving strangers access to your brain. There's a reason you aren't, instead, standing in Time's Square holding open your butt cheeks. (Or maybe you are - blerg!!!!) Michael Albert has a great experiment - he'd ask janitors how much you'd have to pay them to be a doctor. Would you refuse to be a doctor if they didn't quadruple your wages? How about triple? Double? The same? Most of the ones he asked would happily trade places with a doctor for even the same wage. Meanwhile, ask a doctor how much of a pay cut they'd accept to become a janitor. You'd pretty much have to pay them MORE to be a janitor, because of the social status they'd lose. The economics of labour is bullshit. Labour only has exchange value (as Stephen Leacock said), and exchange value is totally distorted by power and privilege, legal frameworks etc. Legalizing prostitution might lower its exchange value, rather than raise it, as it would for drugs. Maybe there's already research on this. http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/world-press-photo-2012-winners/2012/02/10/gIQA1EJ83Q_gallery.html?hpid=z6#photo=6 -- * WHERE'S MY ARTICLE, WORLD? http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Flick_Harrison * FLICK's WEBSITE & BLOG: http://www.flickharrison.com # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org