Belgium is working towards new laws regarding sex work, making the workers eligeble for pensions, healthcare plans, contracts and overall more legal status. This was done in corporation with sex workers, orgs surrounding sex work and my place of work, the Union.
Now, I worked with former sex workers and human trafficking victims myself and I am aware of their struggles. I am not going to outright deny their right to fight for improvement.
What bugs me is the normalization of an industry that is heavily, and I mean very heavily, infested with human rights abuses. For every one empowered sexworker there are a thousand human trafficking victims. Giving them a pension is not helping in the slightest.
And then there is the whole thing of tying things like unemployment benefits to you wanting to look for work. Here in Belgium your benefits can be cut as soon as you refuse a job that is offered to you through government instances. What if we further legitimize sex work and you refuse a sex worker position? There have been caes already of the instances offering unemployed actresses porn jobs, so why not offer them sex workers contracts? And why not cut their benefits of they refuse a fitting job? Right?
And everyone is so happy about it. As if the whole industry is one collective of happy people doing a fun job instead of the horror it is.
Sorry for ranting but fuck me what a mess
Oh and then there also is the whole thing of the government interfering if sex is refused more than 10 times a year. A pomp could literally call the government inspection on you for refusing to be raped.
I feel like this was the end goal of the liberal conception of “sex work”. Through the guise of humanizing sex workers they give legal recognition of rape as a “job” for the victim, legitimizing the industry and pimps (more akin to slave owners than your usual industrialist due to their relation to their victims based in direct violence) and allowing it to become a newly opened market for capitalism leading to increased human trafficking rates and sharpened patriarchal contradictions etc.
Good thread on it by the Vice Chair of the Communist Party of Kenya (sorry for twitter link praying for a new twitter frontend)
Here is the linked thread for people who don’t want to go to twitter:
Booker Ngesa Omole ☭:
There is no such a thing like sex work, period! Let’s address the misguided communists who claim “sex work” is legitimate labor. This notion betrays the fundamental principles of Marxism and aligns with capitalist exploitation rather than challenging it.
In a patriarchal society, prostitution isn’t just about humiliation—it’s the highest form of exploitation, primarily affecting poor and working-class women.These women aren’t “workers” in the traditional sense; they’re victims of a system that commodifies their bodies.
The relationship between those who purchase sex and those who sell it is not one of equality. It’s a relationship of oppression, where the powerful exert control over the powerless, perpetuating violence and exploitation.
To suggest that prostitution is anything other than the grossest form of exploitation ignores the brutal realities these women face: physical and psychological violence, poverty, and a society that views them as disposable.
Human beings should never be used as mere instruments for others’ ends. The commodification of women’s bodies contradicts the Marxist principle that people should not be treated as commodities.
True communists must reject the capitalist narrative that seeks to legitimize prostitution under the guise of “sex work.” Our fight is for a society where exploitation is abolished and where women are free from the shackles of patriarchy.
Anything less is a betrayal of our revolutionary ideals and a capitulation to the forces of reaction. We must stand firm against this dangerous rhetoric and fight for the liberation of all women from exploitation.
imo. people (especially comrades) should really consider using the fediverse.
I completely agree here! I remember joining an org where an Ethiopian lady, who works for an org that saves victims of human trafficking and sexual exploitation, gave us a lecture about this. She said the following(I am paraphrasing):
Sex work is not work. Let’s use an example of a job. When you grow old in the job, you gain experience and produce better value and services which in the end will be rewarded with more money. In other words, most workers earnings increase when they get more experienced. In sex “work”, it doesn’t happen that way. The time where you are paid the most will be when you start. In other words, the younger you are the better the pay. This contradicts fundamentally how most jobs and work goes. With this in mind, offering sex for money is not work but the most ruthless and inhumane exploitation.
To this date, I still remember her words.
I agree with the sentiment, but by this definition any professional sport, or modelling, and most acting, is not work.
I think there are other, better arguments to separate sex work from other forms of work.
Misogyny and patriarchy are so normalized and interwoven with our lives that we’re expected to take minor improvements on an abomination as progress. I feel your pain comrade.
It’s like a slave strike that results in a law for better accommodations and maximum amount of corporal violence that can be used. It’d obviously be an improvement in a vacuum but it’s just making something that shouldn’t exist slightly more comfortable while lessening the ammo those against it have. The solution of course is abolition so anything that perpetuates it, normalizes it, gives it good PR, allows people to live in denial about it or act like it’s okay is frustrating and I must say confusing.
This is just the limits of working with reformism and within capitalism I feel. It does make one want to condemn and step away from the whole thing in disgust as a farce.
And I’ve expressed before these same fears. It’s logical and will happen which is why I’m against normalization. I’m not for criminalizing victims but not for legalizing it either for these reasons.
sounds like they are trying to fight the negative aspects of it, as long as sex workers themselves have a leading potion in stuff like this i think it cant be negative. human trafficking and abuses within the industry is only able to be so prevalent because it exists in the shadows and in a grey zone if not outright the black market. whatever u think of sex work and its place in future societies and its validity as work, sex workers are workers and they are some of the most oppressed and badly treated workers im glad for anything that improves their position.
Completely agree. I haven’t worked up the courage, but it’s something I absolutely would like to do as a part time job. It’s a service like any other, and it should be treated as such.
Edit: to the downvoters, why? My body your choice?
Other users have summed it up: you are legitimizing sex work as a “real job” instead of the horror that it is.
Sex work has long-term consequences. Mia Khalifa was admonished by her family and people back in Lebanon after the video became viral.
It’s all fine ideas when you are an outsider looking in, but to me at least, it sounds like it just gives the illegal part of the sex industry more insentive to traffick human beings instead of hiring a legitimately consensual sex worker.
legitimately consensual sex worker
no such thing, really. Not a lotta rich kids signing up to be sex workers.
That’s not exactly as profound as you think it is. Plenty of people enjoy their job or aspects of it, but hate the commodification of their labor.
I think what you’re saying is somewhat chauvinist, even if you do have a point. Sex workers themselves aren’t a monolith, and I think marxist sex workers deserve a bigger voice.
there’s vanishingly little consensual wage labor by that standard
also “sex work” is an umbrella that includes onlyfans feet posters, not just intercourse
What the fuck is are you talking about? Yes, obviously there is basically no such thing as consentual wage labor, we don’t call it wage slavery just to be provocative. I’m so sick of communists turning into libertarians the minute sex work comes up.
