March 1, 7 pm at Revolution Books NYC: The Industrialization of Sexual Exploitation and Global Capitalism, Or Why “Sex Work” Is Not “Agency” but Nightmare and Degradation, and Why We Need Revolution

1. Calling Oppression by Another Name Does Not Change the Essence of “Sex Work”... and Prostitution and Pornography Are Part of a Larger Matrix of the Subjugation of Women

Yes, “sex work” is work. And to be clear, “sex workers” should not be criminalized, persecuted, and abused. They are human beings whose humanity, as is the case for all women, is denied, devalued, and endangered under capitalist-imperialist patriarchy. But let's also be clear that “sex work” is not just work; it is the female body for sale, on offer, for sexual control, domination, and degradation.

Because prostitution/”sex work” is part of a larger matrix of the structural-sexual oppression of women: rape and sexual violence, including marital rape; domestic battering and abuse of children; women in the U.S. and elsewhere denied the right to abortion and control over their reproductive choices; pervasive commodification of the female body—in advertising, entertainment, fashion; a “beauty industry” that tells girls and women what their bodies must look like; young men trained in “guy culture”; unrelenting sexual harassment in the workplace; a multi-billion dollar pornography industry that equates pleasure and arousal with domination, pain, and humiliation; the racialized, sexual stereotyping of Black, Brown, and Asian women.

“Sex work” is not the same as sex trafficking/slavery. But as Bob Avakian has put it, the product of “sex work” is the degradation of women. And whatever the intentions of “sex workers,” this activity reinforces the objectification and degradation of women.

2. One Might “Choose” to Be a “Sex Worker”... but You Don't Get to Choose the Choices

The fact that people might choose to become a “sex worker” does not change the nature of prostitution. That this is a choice that an unemployed or poorly-paid woman might make in order to feed her children... or a choice that an upper-middle class graduate student might make to maximize income and study time... or a choice that a trans person kicked out of a family or denied work might make to survive and seek some kind of affirmation—is just an indictment of a system based on exploitation and gender oppression. The choices people confront flow from the nature of this system. Why is dealing drugs, or joining a gang, or going into the genocidal U.S. military part of the narrow range of choices that poor Black and Brown youth have?

Instead of defending the putrid choices this system puts before us, why not take up the liberating cause of radically transforming the choices that all of humanity could have!

3. Wake Up to the Fucking Globalization and Industrialization of Sexual Exploitation

The scholar Catharine MacKinnon has commented that prostitution is not the world's oldest profession but the world's oldest oppression. (Marxism understands the subjugation of women as bound up with the historic division of human society into exploiters and exploited, masters and slaves.) But imperialist globalization of the last 50 years has brought about an unheard of, a mammoth, scale and horror of commercial sexual exploitation: sex tourism in Thailand, Amsterdam, and elsewhere; brothel villages in Bangladesh; sex-trafficking "supply chains" transporting women from Nigeria, Nepal, China, and countless other countries; a global “sex industry” linked up with travel and hotel industries, with cyber-currency and internet advertising.

Read my pamphlet here about the forces driving commercial sexual exploitation and its integration into the world economy... and read the stories of the “descent into hell”—of women forced to service 12 to 20 men a day. Yes, living in the heartland of imperialism, you can avert your gaze from this horror and wax on about "sex work" as “empowerment.” But this is the global reality!

4. We Don't Have to Live This Way

That too is part of reality! We can do far better than deluding ourselves that we can “own” our oppression. We can make a revolution to overthrow this system and put an end to this oppression and to all exploitation and oppression. A society and world where women are not on display and viewed as sexual objects, or see themselves as marketable sexual objects. Where there is full equality between women and men, where we can go to work on uprooting patriarchy and male supremacy—and transforming the economy, the ways that people relate to each other, and where sexual relations are based on shared affection, mutual pleasure, and equality.

You cannot break all the chains, except one. You cannot say you want to be free of exploitation and oppression, except you want to keep the oppression of women by men. You can't say you want to liberate humanity yet keep one half of the people enslaved to the other half. The oppression of women is completely bound up with the division of society into masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited, and the ending of all such conditions is impossible without the complete liberation of women. All this is why women have a tremendous role to play not only in making revolution but in making sure there is all-the-way revolution. The fury of women can and must be fully unleashed as a mighty force for proletarian revolution.

—Bob Avakian, BAsics: 3:22.

See you on March 1... let's open up this discussion and debate, and confront the reality of this world... and the potential for a revolution to change everything!

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Resources

*Raymond Lotta, The "Industrialization" of Sexual Exploitation, Imperialist Globalization, and the Descent Into Hell

*Bob Avakian on: Under capitalism every job exploits you, so what’s the difference with sex work? There IS a difference

*The Revcoms Respond to Bob Avakian on Abortion Rights & the Emancipation of Women