Let’s Make Sex Work!
Bills, we all have them. Some are overdue and some are paid on time, but there is no doubt that we all work in order to make money. Work is how we define ourselves in today’s society, we work in exchange for payment so we can make an income to live our daily lives. We work to provide and maintain ourselves in order to live a comfortable lifestyle or at least try to. Some people work in an office organizing files for corporations, some teach your four year old daughter how to count to ten, and others perform sexual activities in exchange for payment, also known as money for head. I make fourteen dollars and fifty cents an hour as a behavior instructor with a bachelors degree in progress. Instead of receiving an hourly wage some people put a price on what their mouth and genital areas can do to satisfy the sexual needs of others.
Sex work can be anyone who is hired as an actor in sex tapes, has consensual sex for money, and anyone who identifies themselves in the sex industry. There are all types of genders and people of different ethnicities who put a price on sexual favors. When we think of sex work, more than often people will come up with this ideal middle aged white woman, who partakes in drugs and who was raped as a child, basically a victim. Perhaps there was a circumstance in their life that correlates with their decision on becoming a sex worker, but it is most certainly not always the case. This is as Gayle Robins states in The Traffic of Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex, female oppression. The ideal sex worker is always portrayed as a woman which is based on male dominance and a necessity for a sexually egalitarian society. We lack equality in the gender system because there are definitely male sex workers who are strippers and pornography actors, but due to the oppression of women they are seen as prey and nothing more than the helpmate of man.
There is a controversy regarding whether or not we should make sex work acceptable in today’s society since sex should be conservative and remain in the bedroom between a heterosexual, monogamous, and married couple. According to Kamala Kempadoo’s Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights, the only way to remove the criminalization and negative stigma on prostitution, which should be referred to as sex work, is to fulfill women’s rights of sexuality and labor in itself. Women are often viewed as property, the less people have used it the higher in value it is. Gayle S. Rubin in, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” states, that there are disagreements towards sexual behaviors but they should still be respected when social stress is at an all time high. Communities who were participating in activities that were outside the comfort zones of the people during the 1960’s would be persecuted along with that homosexuals would be hunted for purges. There needs to be a balance for gender and sexual systems to make work what it is.
If you were asked to perform oral sex on someone would you do it for free, or would you put a price on it? There are millions of sex workers who perform sexual favors for money to buy clothing, food, and pay their bills. If you receive a weekly pay your money arguably would go towards your rent, market, and other bills that need to be paid. There is no difference when it comes to a sex worker dancing on a pole for dollars in order to pay for her tuition and car payments. Gayle Robins, author of The Traffic of Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex, explains how women are used as a surplus by the capitalistic society because they receive lower wages which is only beneficial to the employer . Women do not need to be domesticated and we deserve equal pay along with being able to perform sexual favors in exchange for money because it is work, a customer service type of work.
Unfortunately, some sex workers are automatically labeled as victims. They are assumed to have gone through some turmoil in their life that resulted in their sex work occupation. Kempadoo mentions that not all involved in sex workers are victims, and eliminating the sex industry to the core in order to prevent such atrocities like human trafficking will not be successful. There needs to be regulations in order for sex workers to make it a respectable occupation because we are all working in order to support ourselves in one way or another. Karl Marx’s “The Meaning of Human Requirements Where There is Private Property…The Difference Between Extravagant Wealth and Industrial Wealth” and “The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society” suggests the idea of using everything that is yours to your advantage, by extracting money with lust if it is necessary. How we make money may be different, but we are all making money against the capitalistic society who gains surplus from women’s lower wages.
Let sex workers satisfy their customer’s sexual needs for dollars and let those secretaries file those office files if they must. We all need to work.
