Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

call it – eliding the experiences and needs of the majority of sex workers, most of whom are not bourgeois.
     
    Dr Brooke Magnanti of Bristol was recently forced to out herself as Belle de Jour, the former PhD student and prostitute behind the blog which turned into the book which turned into the lucrative, trashily unchallenging ITV adaptation, Secret Diary of a Call Girl, in which Billie Piper wears a variety of rump-revealing latex dresses and does a lot of heavy breathing. The show, now in its third series, has become the dominant vehicle for the Belle De Jour meme, stripping out everything that was realistic and challenging about Dr Magnanti’s blog and leaving a deodorised husk of middle-class male fantasy in which a massively undercast Piper perkily advises the audience to “work out what the client wants, and give it to him as quickly as possible”.
     
    The glamorisation of bourgeois prostitution, alongside complete popular indifference to making sex work any safer or more legal, betrays a persistent patriarchal anxiety to maintain a status quo that constrains and commodifies female sexuality. This easy structure of umbrage and oppression hardly offers an answer to people like Rebecca Mott, a former prostitute and abolitionist activist:
     
“The torment of being prostituted has never left me. On the first night, when I was fourteen, I was gang-raped for many hours. That was the test to see if I was suitable material for prostitution. You learn that your body is there to be damaged. That you have no right to say no. That your purpose is to service men in any and every way they can think of. It is so much easier to speak only of women who appear in charge of their own working environment, rather than the reality.”
     
    The main element missing from the contemporary conversation about prostitution, as ever, is class. The one thing that almost no-one has asked about Belle De Jour is why a PhD student might find herself selling sexual intercourse to fund her studies in the first place. Commentators are slow to connect the glamorous fantasy of Belle with a bankrupt higher education system in which indebted students routinely live well below the poverty line to afford the degrees their future employers increasingly demand. In 2010, a report by Kingston University suggested that since the abolition of the student grant, the number of British students funding their degrees by working as prostitutes and strippers had increased fivefold. 7
     
    Sex work is an economic question, not a moral one: in a world where shame and sexual violence are still hard currency, the normalisation of the sex industry is a symptom not of social degeneration, but of the economic exploitation of women on an unprecedented scale, in a feminised labour market where all working women are expected to commodify their sexuality to some extent. The violence done to the bodies of sex workers and the moral marginalisation of prostituted women impacts on all women, everywhere.
     
    The ubiquity of female sex work as fact and as social narrative affects women who are not sex workers, because under late capitalism, all female sexuality is work. The labouring sexual bodies of prostitutes are hated, feared and punished by society at large as part of a culture that understands female sexual objectification as labour whilst remaining terrified of the notion of women gaining real control over the proceeds of that labour. Why else has the idea of ‘pimping’ become a shorthand for cool over the past decade? Women must remain alienated from the means of sexual labour and reproduction, so it is vital that we remain alienated from our sexuality, even if it’s our main means of survival in the meat market of modern capitalism. Popular culture reminds women that the sale of sexual signs is precarious as well as crucial, and that even if we get it completely right – even if we work out how to give the clients exactly what they want – we will never be allowed to own our sexual bodies.
     

2
Taking Up Space
     
    Female hunger – for public power, for independence, for sexual gratification – must be contained. On the body of the anorexic woman such rules are grimly etched
Susan Bordo
    We live in a world which worships the unreal female body and despises real female power. In this culture, where women are commanded to always look available but never actually be so, where, where we are obliged to be appear socially and sexually consumable whilst