In a review of Melissa Gira Grant’s Playing the Whore, Katha Pollitt faults today’s left for its acceptance of sex work:
It’s one thing to say sex workers shouldn’t be stigmatized, let alone put in jail. But when feminists argue that sex work should be normalized, they accept male privilege they would attack in any other area. They accept that sex is something women have and men get (do I hear “rape culture,” anyone?), that men are entitled to sex without attracting a partner, even to the limited extent of a pickup in a bar, much less pleasing or satisfying her. As Grant says, they are buying a fantasy—the fantasy of the woman who wants whatever they want (how johns persuade themselves of this is beyond me). But maybe men would be better partners, in bed and out of it, if they couldn’t purchase that fantasy, if sex for them, as for women, meant finding someone who likes them enough to exchange pleasure for pleasure, intimacy for intimacy.
The current way of seeing sex work is all about liberty—but what about equality? I thought the left was about that, too.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown disagrees:
I’m not sure what Pollitt means by “normalized.”
I’ve never seen any feminists arguing that prostitution should be the predominant sexual paradigm or that scores more people should go into it. We simply think that prohibition of sex work creates more problems than it solves, that adults should be free to engage in sexual contracts with one another as they see fit, and that driving sex work underground leads to more exploitative conditions for those who are coerced or forced into it. If that’s “normalization,” sure, but it wouldn’t be the first term I’d choose. Semantics aside, the fact that a practice may contribute to troubling gender expectations simply isn’t justification to prohibit it.
Erik Loomis also takes issue with Pollitt’s moralizing tone:
Unfortunately, while Pollitt is writing in the language of second-wave feminism, she’s also writing in the language of prohibitionism. She tries to stigmatize a reality of the world as immoral, but in fact just reinforces a system by which women are in fact victimized. Even the poor women she accuses Grant of ignoring are not helped by keeping sex work illegal. If you legalize sex work, you are going to make it harder for underground sex operations that treat women terribly to continue because a major reason why they exist is that sex work is illegal and therefore stigmatized. That’s not to say sex work is great–it’s a bad job—but keeping it illegal does not promote the equality that Pollitt wants to see.
The Dish 