I cannot indulge in the reduction of the female reality to pseudointellectualism practice and that’s what occurs when you add to the noise, interpretation makes it indistinguishable from performance. To constantly defend women and their humanness is not a matter of coalition building, it is political strategy to extract what is left in our unstable formations, like the labor of women, consistently regarded both as useful and useless depending on the male resolution. Today, however, I decided to read only to be punched in the gut by the increase of people believing decriminalization of prostitution actually helps prostituted women and children. The pursuit of safety within sex work, built on the commodifocation of the body that is the person, is locating justice in the same place designed to annihilate it.
Today, we call it freedom, sometimes the more sophisticated "agency", but a decade ago, this is regarded as “idealism"— changing a social reality by reasoning it does not exist, transforming the world by modifying perception. The irony lies on the premise that ‘decriminalization’ in actuality aims to destabilize ‘inequality' within a contract, the same contract which would not exist if women are recognized as distinct, independent creatures, and equally deserving of the rights designated to those who are not only constitutionally considered human but is in the Real, in the flesh, in the experiential layer of being, human.
Accepting prostitution (AKA “sex work” rebranded by the patriarchal - capitalist industry) as inevitable and natural is essentializing women’s already subordinated status. This was never the case in the varying class antagonisms in existence, the proletariat despite the class antagonism spanning decades, has never assimilated to the bourgeoisie’s conception of freedom or safety net, neither people of color bowed down to the legalization of slavery despite white supremacists having the upperhand, Filipino ancestors died to contest their sovereignty during the Spanish colonization, and no revolutionary homosexual accepted heteronormative narratives of “default” sexuality. Now, why do we accept safety born from the hands that suffocate us, and why is ‘dehumanization’ the only reality possible when the class fighting and to be fought for are women?
Every time you think to yourself, you are doing women good by nodding to the industry that profits from their abuse. Remember, you are not calling for adequate structural support in order for women and children to exit the industry, you're calling for the legalization of their exploitation. In layman’s terms, you are not only permitting rape culture to absorb everything in existence, you are advocating for the constitutional protection of the male, the male gaze, and the male institution to subordinate, objectify, and dehumanize women by recognizing their “right” to buy women as worthy of legislation and debate.
In the end, truly, the worst realization to ever exist when you come to terms with the existence of patriarchy and its purveryors, is understanding that women have been taught to be against themselves so thoroughly for them to wear the language built for women by women, to advance male supremacy, appropriating what is for their liberation to reinforce the heirarchy that keeps them less than human. The fight of feminism is deemed a culture war despite women having the same status as cattle, only existing to be fucked, to reproduce, and to boost economy. We have vegan activists against the inhumane production of livestock, we have environmental activists constantly rallying about the exploitation of mother nature, we have people who believe men can be women by declaration. But we cannot even recognize prostitution to be inherently patriarchal- capitalistic because in practice, no one cares about being anticapitalist when the one being sold is a woman or being anti-patriarchy when the stakes actually produce female liberation.
