Dear Julie Bindel:
Why Selling Sex is Not Selling Your Self
Today’s Guardian featured a celebratory article by Julie Bindel on Iceland’s new ban on strip clubs. Hip hip hurray! Now women in Iceland can live in a globalized raunch culture but never get paid for their participation. Liberation indeed.
First of all, if you think women are objectified by our hyper-sexed culture and you want change, the banning of strip clubs is certainly no place to start. At least those women earn money doing what they do. I wish I had been paid for those hours I put in at school discos back in high school where bumping and grinding was simply what was done to ‘fit in’.
But let’s get to the bigger picture. So-called ‘feminists’ are now powerful enough to tell women who disagree with them that they have no right to capitalize on their sexual power. That they are deluding themselves if they feel empowered by earning money with their ‘tits and ass’. I thought it was supposed to be patriarchy that attempted to control the way women use their sexuality, not the ‘women’s movement’ itself?
One’s ability to do manual labour involving heavy lifting often relies on having typically male biological traits, just as stripping tends to depend on having typically female ones. In our economy, we capitalize on our assets – whether genetic or learned, physical or intellectual, etc.
So unless you’re trying to undermine the entire capitalist system of selling labour, the sex industry is like any other service industry and should be treated as such. That is, after all, what so many sex workers are fighting for themselves.
But no, we read that “the men of Iceland will just have to get used to the idea that women are not for sale”. Why is dancing on stage in clothing selling your service as a dancer, but dancing on stage without clothing actually selling ‘you’? It’s pure discrimination that reeks of puritanical notions of sex and self – particularly with regard to women.
If women involved in the sex industry are not there by choice (a relative notion – how many work their lives at McDonalds by ‘choice’?) then that is something to work on. But it is only through the de-stigmatisation of sex work that we will start to see a sex industry where those working do so because they want to, and those who don’t find a job they’re better suited to.
Let’s not disenfranchise women in the name of feminism. Because when it comes to women’s rights, it’s all about choice – right, sister?
” capitalize on their sexual power”
–Making women’s sexuality into a luxury good is not economic empowerment. Men have the money, women spread their legs and get a little bit of it. And ALL women have to live with the fact that their bodies and sexuality are marketable products.
” At least those women earn money doing what they do. ”
–Which is exploit women’s sexuality for a few hundred bucks. It’s not like they can, oh, forgo doing that and find other ways to make money.
Selling French fries is not equivalent to having sex. If you need to simplify the issue this way, you are not prepared to engage in meaningful conversation about it.
“When it comes to women’s rights…?” Actually, no, it’s not about some women’s right to make a personal profit off of my sexuality. Or my sister’s. Or my daughter’s. Or my friends’… Or yours.
” I wish I had been paid for those hours I put in at school discos back in high school where bumping and grinding was simply what was done to ‘fit in’.”
Never mind, I think I see the problem here. I’m not surprised that a juvenile attitude about sex would ensue from someone who seriously wrote that as some evidence for her argument about sex work. Really, grow up.
Sexuality is a luxury good – be under no illusion, that is the nature of capitalism. Every kind of intimate service is now available for the right price per hour – childcare, nursing the elderly, massage, therapy, you name it. Inevitably sex is no different. And the idea that one woman deciding to make an income selling her sexual services somehow takes away from your rights as a woman is ludicrous. Do women who take care of other people’s children for money take away from women’s natural nurturing capacity and rights as mothers? Capitalism is exploitation of labor – every kind of labor. We are all whores. And the fact that you think selling french fries is completely different from selling sex demonstrates only that you are probably not meant to work in the sex industry. But any so-called ‘feminist’ who would tell other women what they can and cannot do with their own bodies are only taking the place of the old patriarchy. Femi-nazis indeed.