I think I can safely speak for virtually all sex workers when I say that we don’t want to be passive tools used by governments and NGOs as the excuse for tyranny; we simply want to be left alone to live our lives like anyone else, with the same rights, privileges, duties and legal protections as people in every other profession. – “Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs”
Today is International Sex Worker Rights Day, a day for protest and activism held on the anniversary of a 2001 sex worker festival in India which succeeded despite efforts by prohibitionists to stop it via their usual means, collusion with the “authorities”. I think that has tremendous symbolic value: prohibitionists would like to stop our whole movement if they could, to silence us, suppress us and turn us into the helpless, voiceless victims who populate their masturbatory fantasies; it’s therefore important to celebrate a major victory over them so we can remind ourselves that no matter how strenuously our enemies fight to hold us down, and no matter how many cops and politicians they conspire with, we must still win in the long run. Furthermore, the fact that the observance started in India is in my mind very important; Indian sex workers are an inspiration and an example to their American sisters, and what we take lying down or weakly protest in small groups, they shout down with the thunderous voice of tens of thousands working together. When I first wrote about the day four years ago it was barely even known in North America (though well-observed all over Asia and Africa), but has since caught on and gets more press every year. I don’t think we’ll ever have anything like the sheer numbers the Indian groups can boast, but maybe by observing their day we can fortify ourselves with some of their indomitable spirit. I don’t mean by some sort of sympathetic magic, mind you, but rather by keeping their example in our minds.
Today of all days is especially important to me personally, because it will be the first group sex worker rights event I’ve ever participated in. I’ve been writing about sex worker rights online for almost eleven years now, and collecting those writings in one place (and under one name!) for five of them; last year I spent months travelling across the country speaking on the subject to anyone who would listen, from individuals to groups of dozens to TV audiences of many thousands. But everything I’ve ever done as an activist was undertaken either completely alone, or with the help of sympathetic outsiders. And I’ve come to realize that, as effective as I’ve been, I’ve never had the experience of working with other whores on a concerted action. It’s one of the things I moved to Seattle for; if you read yesterday’s column you already know another, equally important reason. As I said on New Year’s Day, I’ve broken out of the cocoon in which I had wrapped myself for so long; though I’m still going to do a lot of my fighting from behind this keyboard, I’m also going to be doing a lot of hands-on work. And though much of my most important activism will still be solitary, a lot of it will follow the example of my Indian heroines, battling side-by-side in the trenches with my sisters.
We’ll make a proper communitarian anarchist out of you yet Maggie.
If you can just get over those American myths of individualism, ‘free’ enterprise and meritocracy.
Wouldn’t communitarian anarchy be incompatible with sex work?
Didn’t seem to be in the 1930s in the anarchist controlled areas of Spain. They mostly organised under the principles of syndicalism.
A ‘mature’ communitarian anarchist society would primarily operate as a gift economy (think Anarres in LeGuin’s fiction) so the term ‘work’ would mean something different. There would still be asymmetrical demand for sex though, so there would still be a place for skilled providers of sexual services.
Some Spanish anarchists were prejudiced against sex workers, but there were providers integrated into the anarchist militias, particularly in Aragón. The Republic had previously banned sex work in 1935.
True, but the ban was rescinded in December 1936 in Republican controlled areas due in part to pressure from the anarchist Health Minister Federica Montseny (though doubtless primarily due to pragmatism).
The official CNT attitude was that prostitution would wither away once social and economic inequality was eliminated but that it should not be suppressed in the meantime. Naive I know but even today such an attitude would be a big improvement in most places. It was particularly progressive in the context of the sexism that existed in 1930s Spain, even among anarchists.
BTW, the anarchist brothels in Barcelona had prominent signs reminding patrons that the working girls were comrades too.
I don’t know a lot on the subject so my following comment may be naive. I don’t understand how a gift economy is fundamentally different from a free market economy. Money is just an easy way to exchange gifts. If people set their own value for what they are willing to pay or accept and this is subject to laws of offer/demand, then there is individualism and free enterprise. You still have people with more valuable skills or resources, so it remains a meritocracy.
Well for one thing, free market capitalism always concentrates wealth upwards until the top 1% are not only able to increase their wealth faster than anyone else, they eventually strangle the whole system by ensuring the bottom 99% no longer have enough money for anything beyond necessities. An increasing proportion of resources then go into protecting the wealthy and their property from the increasingly disgruntled, desperate and numerous poor.
Under a gift economy people would be very unlikely to make especially large gifts to those who are already better off than everyone else.
That depends on what you call ‘valuable’. Or more particularly; valuable to whom or what.
Top real estate salesmen and market speculators are basically only valuable to themselves and their employers. As we saw from the crash of 2009 they are not an asset to the rest of us at all. Nonetheless, because of how ‘free’ markets operate these people are becoming richer and more powerful and can count on being able to continue their risky behaviour secure in the knowledge that when they fuck up it will be the rest of us who will pay to bail them out.
‘Merit’ is a relative term. Good mothers are particularly important to our society but our ‘meritocracy’ offers them very few rewards for their hard work.
But the worst part of ‘meritocracy’ is the ‘ocracy’. The assumption that people judged by an arbitrary measure are fit to rule over others. Doubtless societies of the Dark Ages would have been easily convinced that theocracies are meritocracies – after all, God wouldn’t allow a bunch of losers to rise to the top of his church would he? These days we’ve set up something completely inhuman that has goals often incompatible with human wellbeing. We call it a ‘free market’ and allow its dictates to over-rule the judgement of individuals and experts in many fields. At least God was created in the image of humans. The same superstitious awe and obedience is now afforded to Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ as if it too was omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent.
Your claims about free market capitalism are pretty absurd.
When you talk about a ‘gift’ economy, you’re basically arguing in favor of barter. If you’re talking about anything other than barter, then I don’t know how a ‘gift economy’ is functionally different than a free market, other than you just asserting that it is so.
“Under a gift economy people would be very unlikely to make especially large gifts to those who are already better off than everyone else.”
Sure, if you just make wild claims about a fantasy land that doesn’t exist and has never existed, you can say all kinds of good things would result from your mythic never-before-seen economy. I guess maybe certain tribes or plains Indians operated in something describable as a gift economy, but personally I don’t want to live in the poverty that afflicted the Huron. Do you?
“Top real estate salesmen and market speculators are basically only valuable to themselves and their employers. As we saw from the crash of 2009 they are not an asset to the rest of us at all.”
You cannot seriously believe that real estate salesmen have no value to anyone other than themselves. They have value to both the real estate buyer (who can go to them rather than wasting time searching for property themselves) and to the seller (who can just pawn off all the work that would be required to sell). If that’s not ‘value’ then value does not exist.
“We call it a ‘free market’ and allow its dictates to over-rule the judgement of individuals and experts in many fields.”
The free market is individuals. The market cannot ‘overrule’ the judgement of individuals, since individuals are the ones making the decisions on which a market consists. It’s also funny that you say the market overrules ‘experts in many fields’ given that you also complain about meritocracy. If you’re opposed to meritocracy, on what basis do you determine someone to be an expert?
“The same superstitious awe and obedience is now afforded to Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ as if it too was omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent.”
I don’t know of a single human being, regardless of how libertarian, who worships and is overawed by the existence of the market. I know people who argue the market is the best form of organization, but your attempt to declare anyone who disagrees with you a religious fanatic falls a little flat.
Try googling ‘gift economy’. You’ll find it’s not barter. Nor is it inconsistent with currency.
Gift economies are and have probably always been the primary way tribal societies operate. Alternatives are a very recent innovation in terms of the human race as a whole.
Maybe, just maybe, you should try to find out a little about gift economies before spouting off about them. You could start with Wikipedia.
That’s a non-sequitur comparable to pointing out that Haiti has a capitalist economy and that to endorse capitalism is to call for Haitian standards of living. Of course to endorse laissez-faire capitalism is to endorse near universal poverty as without non-capitalist mechanisms to keep pumping wealth back down from the top that’s exactly where it leads. If you want to learn instead of speaking from ignorance you might also look up ‘crisis of capital’ then think about what can be done to alleviate it once markets have all been globalised into one (a state we are rapidly approaching).
They add no value whatsoever. Whether you sell your house for a thousand or a million it makes not a jot of difference to it’s utility as a house. You are confusing value with cost. It’s not the salesmen who list properties for people to conveniently browse, it’s some underpaid clerk in the office. They create value. Salesmen only create hype and bubbles.
Nonsense. It’s possible to have a market run entirely by computers (a lot of the stock market already is) and to have individuals without a market.
I never said there is no merit. Simply that it shouldn’t rule. Pimply teenaged computer geeks certainly have expertise but they shouldn’t be running things any more than expert scientists, expert bureaucrats or expert industrialists should.
Anything as complex as an economy is beyond the ken of people. Compare the predictions of economists to actual outcomes if you don’t believe me.
Yet there are lots of people around who believe that if you just take your hands off the tiller and allow markets to operate without oversight it will all work out for the best. That is a faith based belief system equivalent to thinking there is an infallible god that will always look after us if we just deliver ourselves completely into his hands. It’s a religion.
+1 to everything Jon said. Very well put!
Yes, we already know where your head’s at on economics jd.
It must be very dark up there.
Sorry, but I’ll never “get over” the idea of individualism, nor do I consider it a “myth”; it is in fact my highest ideal. Lack on individuality is for ants and bees, not humans.
But it’s nonsense of course.
We might not be social insects but we are social animals. What you call ‘you’ is an amalgam of the influences of thousands of other people – starting with your Mom. Well, before her actually. By the time you were five you would have uncritically absorbed ideas and attitudes that go back at least as far as Socrates that are now so much a part of ‘you’ that they are transparent to you. You are unlikely to even notice, much less question them.
And unless you have a DIY Home Genetic Engineering Kit your DNA has all come down from other people too.
In terms of both nature and nurture you are nothing but the intersection of many others. You are essentially empty. Unless you believe in some kind of unique soul that somehow makes you into you (which is of course another Western trope most people take on without question and retain even if they reject religion). Any attempt to draw a border between yourself and others is arbitrary and culturally determined.
Some societies promote the conceit that we all think for ourselves more than others but interestingly those societies are also the ones that invest the most into controlling how people think. If you ask me they’re related. Salespeople love to emphasise your individual choice while trying to manipulate it.
So when you sell a product of ‘your own’ creativity you are really just onselling something you got from society as a whole. Individual enterprise doesn’t exist. It is merely an ideology for privatising profits while socialising costs.
Totally disagree. We are not merely the products of reductive Skinnerian processes; those are simply influences on an individual already unique from birth. You may call that mystical if you like.
Well I wouldn’t call it mystical because that word refers to the mystical experience and the insights thereof. If you either have mystical experiences or read up on them you will find that right across cultures they tend to point at the same thing and that is definitely not individualism, but unity. Hence the perennial philosophy. Individualism is the antithesis of mysticism.
I wouldn’t call my argument Skinnerian either, because that would be to suggest that people are only their external reactions to events and they either have no inner life, it can’t be defined and/or it’s unimportant. I neither said nor believe that.
Nor would I deny that we are each unique. Every bee and ant and grain of sand on the beach is also unique (as is every beach and every coastline).
It’s not individuation I’m arguing against, but individualism. The notion that it’s meaningful to draw a line and call everything inside ‘me and mine’ and everything outside ‘them and theirs’. That’s nothing but an egoistic conceit.
Everything you have and are – from your car to your body to your thoughts to your deeds – are not just continuous with everything else in your perceptual universe but made of it. Is that to say it’s deterministic? I wouldn’t know. The dichotomy between determinism and free will is predicated upon exactly the artificial distinction between person and environment I reject. I’m just an aspect of the universe and attempts to pin the universe down to a clockwork physicalist model have been quite unsuccessful so far. What I do know is if there is free will it’s not mine. It’s inherent in reality as I experience it.
Indigenous people – by and large – understand their continuity with their tribe and with the land. Hindus know they are all aspects of Nirguna Brahman. Buddhists know the ‘self’ is an empty conceit. But non-mystics from Judeo-Christian-Islamic societies start with a notion of a separate god that has created separate souls each of which is solely (no pun intended) responsible for it’s own virtues and sins and will be judged and rewarded or punished for them for eternity. They have created an all powerful god that manipulates the universe then they have separated themselves from him. So they have come to see themselves as something separate from the universe that manipulates it. Hence the conceit of individualism that so defines Western culture and reductionist science.
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