“anti-prostitution feminists implicitly agree with the Erotic Professional. They, too, think that the question of whether sex work is work should primarily be fought on the terrain of whether sex work is good work. They merely disagree that commercial sex could ever fall into the category of ‘good work’. They therefore position work in general as something that the worker should find fulfilling, non-exploitative, and enjoyable. Deviation from this supposed norm is treated as evidence that something cannot be work. ‘It’s not work, it’s exploitation’ is a refrain you hear again and again. One feminist policymaker in Sweden told a reporter, ‘Don’t say sex work, it’s far too awful to be work.’ Awfulness and work are positioned as antithetical: if prostitution is awful, it cannot be work. Anti-prostitution feminists and even policymakers often ask sex workers whether we would have sex with our clients if we weren’t being paid. Work is thus constantly being re-inscribed as something so personally fulfilling you would pursue it for free. Indeed, this understanding is in some ways embedded in anti-prostitution advocacy through the prevalence of unpaid internships in such organisations. Equality Now, a major, multimillion-dollar anti-prostitution organisation, instructs applicants that their eight-to-ten week internships will be unpaid (adding that ‘no arrangements can be made for housing’). Such posts are common: Ruhama advertises numerous volunteer roles that could easily be paid jobs. In 2017, a UK anti-slavery charity came under fire in the national press for advertising unpaid internships. In 2013, Turn Off the Red Light, an Irish anti-prostitution NGO consortium, advertised for an intern who would not be paid the minimum wage. The result of these unpaid and underpaid internships is that the women who are most able to build careers in the women’s sector – campaigning and setting policy agendas around prostitution – are women who can afford to do unpaid full-time work in New York and London. In this context, it is hardly a surprise that the anti-prostitution movement as a whole has a somewhat abstracted view of the relationship between work and money. Work may be mostly positive for those who can largely set the parameters of the conversation, like high-profile journalists. However, this does not describe reality for most women workers or workers in general (or even many journalists). Most workers suffer some unfair conditions in the workplace and would not, as a rule, do their jobs for free. Work is often pretty awful, especially when it’s low-paid and unprestigious. This is not to say that this state of affairs is good, or that we should accept it because it is normal, but nor is it useful to pretend that work is generally wonderful and exclude from our analysis the demands of workers whose experience does not meet this standard. As with other jobs that women do, sexist devaluation of ‘women’s work’ erases the emotional labour and hustle that constitutes the bulk of sex workers’ actual efforts, reducing our job to simply being available for penetration at all times.”
2087
titsay
vaporwave
andulkaphoto
stormborns
yousharknotpass
janainaart
