Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

exercise, to the creation and maintenance of sexual persona, self-objectification is work, first and foremost. Female sexuality, which every day becomes increasingly synonymous with objectification, is work. And it is impossible to talk about sexuality as work without talking about sex work itself.
     
    One of the supreme ironies of Western gender production is that whilst the sexual sell is everywhere, the sale of sex itself still takes place in a shadowy underworld of social taboo, criminal activity and violence. One can market one’s sexuality and labour to increase erotic capital in the workplace, but prostitutes – the overwhelming majority of whom are women servicing men – are still amongst the most vulnerable and marginalised members of society. Women who do not or cannot compete in the cultural meat market and sell themselves as sexy face social consequences – but the worst thing one can call a woman is ‘whore.'
     
    The contemporary feminist conversation about sex work is a sea of unheard voices, private tragedy and misinformation in which moral squabbling obscures the real-life concerns of many vulnerable women. The net result of continued ideological wrangling between feminists, sex workers’ rights activists and misogynist lawmakers has left the legal status of sex work in Britain and America an unworkable, precarious Jenga tower of muddled laws and moral equivocation, wherein women who work as prostitutes are stranded in a socio-economic no man’s land, their work just about legal enough to offer a seedy but acceptable outlet for restrained bourgeois sexual mores and an economic option for women in desperate financial circumstances, and just about illegal enough that the market for commercial sex remains illicit and underground, depriving sex workers of public dignity and of the full protection of the justice system, and satisfying the prudish public drive to punish those who sell sex.
     
    The recent resurgence in the feminist movement in Britain in particular has seen issues such as abortion rights and the pay gap elbowed out in favour of monolithic tub-thumping about sex work. The argument has descended into a stark moral binary between a vision of sex work as an activity wholly based on free choice or – the more common feminist viewpoint – wholly exploitative. “Equality for women is a farce in a society where it is considered normal for men to buy our bodies,” said Finn MacKay of the Feminist Coalition Against Prostitution. “We can’t be free while so many of us are literally for sale. As long as I believe prostitution is a form of violence against women, then how can I work alongside anyone who promotes it as a job like any other?”
     
    The clunky notion that prostitution is itself violence against women – even, presumably, when both parties are male – obstructs more useful analysis. Only when one acknowledges that sex can, in theory, be sold without exploitation can one ask why it so rarely is, even in the richest societies on earth.
     
    Prostitution is still one of the most dangerous, stigmatised and poorly rewarded jobs that a person can do. Violence is done to sex workers by pimps, johns and punters as well as by the state in the form of police coercion. The marginalisation of the labouring bodies of sex workers is an extreme form of the marginalisation of the labouring bodies of all women. For that reason, the extension of workers’ rights to all those who sell sex should be a point of urgency for feminist activists.
     
    The first point of resistance must, of course, be greater legal protection for those who sell sex. Even the most ideologically divided of activists can agree on this point. In an article for the Guardian in 2010, Thierry Schaffauser, a sex worker and union activist, and Cath Elliott, an abolitionist feminist, concluded that “whilst we’ve all been busy arguing over other things, those most in need of our help continue to suffer violence. We believe the criminalisation of sex workers/prostitutes helps to legitimise those who attack them. Criminalisation of soliciting is a sexist law.” 6
     
    In recent years, a slew of books and television programmes such as Tracy Quan’s Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl have made great show of bringing prostitution out of the shadows when, in fact, something quite different is going on. The prostitution celebrated by pop culture is bourgeois prostitution – ‘high-class’ prostitution, as the tabloids like to