Tweet by Avery Edison, @aedison:
CAPITALISM: Get a job. Get a job or you’re worthless.
Get a job. Why aren’t you getting a job? Get a job. Get a job already.
Get a jo-
WOMAN: Fine, I’ll do sex work.
CAPITALISM: Ew, no, not that job!
WOMAN: Why not?
CAPITALISM: Someone might be forcing you to do it.
Because a lot of women who get into sex work ARE forced to do things they don’t want to do, even if they don’t start out that way. I’m all for forward thinking and finding your own brand of feminism, but every sex worker I know personally (admittedly only 6) has made compromises they regret in their work. Know what you’re getting into. Sex work in itself is not empowerment and the stakes are high.
You missed the point by about 500 miles.
The point is that capitalism forces sex workers to sell their labor in often undesirable conditions because capitalism forces ALL workers to do that.
The problem isn’t sex work versus other work, it’s capitalism. And there is nothing ‘empowering’ about being forced to sell your labor under any circumstances. Work is not empowering, work is exploitation.
And the answer is fighting for workers rights and anti-capitalism every single time.
Right. “Sex work in itself is not empowerment”, okay, and whose job IS under capitalism? Everybody is living in a system where we are obligated to work for basically whatever we can find in order to survive – certainly when I’ve worked retail, or housekeeping (and trafficking is rampant in domestic labor but WEIRDLY there isn’t a constant outcry to ban maid services or nannies) it hasn’t been empowering, I have just needed to eat and not be homeless and in order to do that under capitalism you’re obligated to sell your labor. We don’t seem to care about the dignity or empowerment of other workers, but when it comes to sex work there is a unique burden to prove that we are empowered, that we freely choose the work because we love it and want it and not out of coercion or constraint.
It’s a farce. The entire system is a coercion. I choose the work because I want to eat, have a roof over my head, not die. The same reason anyone works. The constant belaboring of how tragic it is that we are railroaded into choices we may not want by people who uphold the system in all other respects is a joke.
QueerAnarchism 