Let me get this out of my chest: if you report on news like this, using nothing but this admonishing moral panic tone to express disagreement, your feminism and mine are pretty much in the antipodes. No matter how much you believe to represent “Women’s views” (which women? how many women? of which race and/ or ethnicity? from which country? you know I can keep asking questions challenging how representative your “women’s views” are, don’t you?).
Because this is an ongoing problem with which I have less and less patience: the moral, uncritical condemnation of sex work coming from a kind of feminism that I like to call “Middle Class”. This criticism is usually articulated in terms of “OMG THESE SEX WORKERS NEED SAVING AND WE, AS ALL POWERFUL FEMINISTS NEED TO DO THE SAVING ON THEIR BEHALF!”. Why, you might wonder, I call it “Middle Class” and not “White”, as it is bound to be the case more often than not? Because, much to my chagrin, this ideology seems to have also migrated to South America (where I see it popping up in mailing lists and forums I follow).
What these feminists never include or respect are the opinions of sex workers themselves. I’ve been witness to discussions where sex workers have expressed that they do not wish to be saved from themselves, that they are critical of unsavory aspects of their profession (i.e. they do not deny the existence of human trafficking, just to give one broad example) but that they do not wish to have their autonomy and decision making capabilities compromised by women who claim that “they know better”.
What these Middle Class moral positions never, ever take into account is the fact that, for some women, the only means of production they own is their own bodies and/or the fact that some people might have access to other means of production but they would rather exercise their autonomy through sex work.
You know, I thought we were past Second Wave reactionary politics, but it seems that some ideas never quite left.
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