Housework and compulsory heterosexuality

Well then it shouldn't have said that, should it?

You do realize how moralizing all this is? You've missed the key point which has been put to you again and again, which is that all work under capitalism is coercive, exploitative, and oppressive and that it's a fetishization of the sex industry to somehow single it out as somehow inherently more exploitative, coercive, and oppressive than any other industry.

Similarly, you've ignored Commie's point that you're basically advocating consumer power to abolish the sex industry. So unless you somehow actually think you can convince ALL MEN AND BOYS to stop watching porn, buying sex, and going to strip clubs, you're going to have to find a different tactic.

And I still think your understanding of patriarchy is pretty flawed. Of course there is systematic violence against women--not the least of which includes sexual violence. But systematic violence is not the same thing as all relationships between all men and women being oppressive and exploitative. And it certainly it doesn't follow that things like PIV or having sex on camera for the pleasure of others irreconcilably uphold and promote patriarchy.

Finally, you still haven't responded to this very relevant point by Steven:

I think disability and sex work is a tricky one and not one to be written of so easily Deck. Its an 'edge case' for sure, but its often the 'edge cases' tend to help to depolarise and bring some nuance into the argument.

I'll keep it to a quick question which is,

If someone male or female, who is say, unable to pleasure themselves because of a disability, and there are people willing to pleasure them as a job (whatever that job is), you would without hesitation condemn such a dynamic as misogyny and part of rape culture?

Personally I really dont think you can make that call. If you do then you run the risk of condemning, and denying some with acute disabilities any form of intimate and erotic experience. The very thing that we all tend to agree as being quite central to what it is to be human.

sorry this is a bit rambling, it's past my bed time.

The foundation a patriarchy is economic. Yes, systematic violence is used to maintain this.

Why do you consider sex work inherently violent? Or any more violent than other kinds of wage labour? Is all heterosexual sex violent? Or just piv? If so, is paying for a blowjob ok?

Why is buying sex showing any more entitlement over someone else's body than buying other kinds of labour?

Except most porn actors are not being coerced any more than any other workers (obviously there are exceptions.) Men are using women and men for sexual pleasure and women are using women and men for sexual pleasure. "Using" being a pretty loaded term here. Some women don't like porn, or men watching porn. F air enough to have critiques of how misogynist mainstream porn is, but name me a mainstream film which isn't? Should men stop watching all films?

I dunno if I really buy the "disabled punter" argument tbh. At the end of the day, no one actually *needs* to have sex, so no one's entitled to it, whether they're disabled or not. It's crappy that we live in a society where physical impairment is such a barrier to having sex, but really I'm not sure that justifies buying sex.

I also think it's fair to criticise people for buying sex, more so than buying other kinds of work. I feel like sex isn't just like any other activity - rape is worse than forcing people to do stuff generally, we hold people to a higher standard of consent when having sex than other group activities.

~J.

Surely it depends on the dynamic, for example,

http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/life/the-stigma-of-sexual-assistance-20111111-1nace.html

edit - if you can get past some of the crappy language used by the reporter.

Jolasmo wrote:

Are were talking about disabled people who cannot even masturbate? Or people who are having problems getting a mate because of a disability? That certainly makes some difference I believe because yes, there are people who are unable to masturbate and need assistance. It's not a laughing matter.

I don't think anyone's laughing, but at the end of the day, I'd rather someone went without sex/masturbation than someone was coerced into having sex they didn't want to have (financially or otherwise).

And surely wage-slavery is fundamentally always coercive, regardless of its 'dynamic'? I'd think as communists we could pretty much agree on that score.

~J.

Assisting someone to masturbate is not the same as having sex with them, just as assisting some one to eat is not the same as having a meal with them. Also, I'm always a little uncomfortable when imaginary disabled people get used as test cases, without reference to the actual lives of disabled people. Please be careful with it everyone.

And this is the crux of it really. Why is it different? Because it's this either "sacred" or "dirty" thing? Or in other words you're making a moral judgement about sex? What sex is to you is not necessarily what sex is to other people.

Edit - this came across far more bluntly than I meant it. Sorry Jolasmo!

interesting documentary about sex work and disability

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpMJLI0ujsA

Deck access,

You're still not explaining what is so different about sex work to other kinds of wage labour.

I'm not ignoring the points of view of sex workers. If anything, I feel like you're implying sex workers are this monolithic group of people. I could just as easily accuse you of ignoring the massive numbers of sex workers who do feel that sex work is just as exploitative as other kinds of work - no more, no less.

Yes unpaid housework is an important part of maintaining patriarchy and capitalism. But unpaid housework does not totally rely on heterosexuality being compulsory. I think someone made the point earlier in the thread that capitalism is perfectly capable of adapting to incorporate things which are seemingly a threat to it's continuation. The acceptance of gay marriage in mainstream, even right wing, politics is a good example of how threats to capitalist social relations can be controlled and integrated into a capitalist economy.

I'm not saying that societal pressure to conform to manogomous, heterosexual relationships doesn't exist - of course it does - but I think it's niave to think that this is the most significant driving force behind the economics of patriachy. It's far more complex.

Anyway, I feel like this is a complete deflection away from the original points I put to you. How about all the other things in daily life which are built upon and reproduce violent misogyny?

Just want to second this and say that if you can't explain the difference, well then it is just moralizing.

I'd also like you to respond to some of the points and questions which have been put directly to you.

Explain sexual exploitation. Is it when somebody is coerced into doing things with their body, or someone else's, that they wouldn't have freely chosen to do if there wasn't a financial necessity? Sounds a lot like being a construction worker or beauty therapist. So again, what is it about sex that makes it singularly distinctive from other all other activities?

I might have to bow out of this one soon. I find your argument to be pretty circular and self-referential. Not having a go, I realise you're here in good faith, but you're not really dealing with what I'm saying so this feels a bit fruitless.

And what they have in common is exploitation. No doubt exploitation can take many forms, but what fundamentally defines capitalism is the relationship of exploitation.

Shall we debate what forms of work exact the greatest toll in terms of psychological, emotional, and physical exploitation? I mean, we can, and it can have some use. But we understand them as various forms of the same basic exploitation and we fight them in the same ways—not by advocating what basically amounts to a mass boycott, but by supporting the struggles of sex workers for things like decriminalization, regulation, and worker-imposed safety standards.

And this is especially true given the fact that I while I think prostitution as we know it will basically cease to exist after capitalism, things like porn and cabarets (which, even under capitalism, can be self-organised and have radical content) undoubtedly will.

What exactly defines “direct sexual exploitation”? Take the airline industry, for example, where sexual attractiveness is basically part of the job description. What about temping agencies where acceptance of sexual harrassment is a given if you want to keep your job? Is that not direct sexual exploitation? Should men stop flying on airplanes or booking doctor's appointments?

And what industry isn't bound up with patriarchy and doesn't have a direct impact on people's lives and bodies--the female dominated garment industry to pick a topical example? Not to mention the links on the consumer side, say, between the cosmetic and advertising industries on the psychological and sexual well-being of women? It's pretty direct.

That's pretty circular logic, what point are you trying to make?

Absolutely, but the two arguments you present are irreconcilable. Mott sees it as rape, calls for the Nordic model which criminalises customers and dismisses those within the industry who object as 'happy hookers' who aren't representative. Then there are those (some enjoy their job, some don't but prefer it to poverty or what else is on offer) who want it legalised.

There's a difference between ignoring and disagreeing with someone's point of view. Try and understand that difference DA.

With regards to whether sex is a different kind of activity to other forms of work. I think the answer is yes and no tbh

There is nothing inherently worse in selling sex as oppossed to selling other forms of labour in that it´s perfectly possible that some people would prefer selling sex to something else (or find it equal)

But sex as an act is often subjectively very different for lots of people and it would be foolish to deny/ignore this.

We have no problem, in the case of rape, saying forcing someone to have sex is worse than forcing them to do something else, because for the vast majority of people being forced to have sex is going to cause more emotional damage than say being forced to clean something up.

With that in mind I think sex work shouldnt be seen as inevitably different (as people´s own subjective experience of doing sex work are all going to be different) but it should be recognised that for lots of people doing sex work is very different, and potentially more harming than other forms of work.

Good points D.

For some percentage of sex workers, as konsequent said, they have chosen to to be sex workers over taking other kinds of work. That doesn't mean it's a free choice, but it does mean that for a chunk of people it's their preferred form of wage slavery. I don't know whether this coercion is the same as rape. I guess all kinds of wage slavery are forms of abuse, and the psychological effect they have on workers is going to vary massively. Of course being raped is worse than having to clean up, but there are lots of people who prefer being sex workers than cleaners.

But you're right, it's not this clear cut thing, there definitely seems to be some grey area.

I guess what D said, basically. I don't think we should mystify sex, but we should be aware that (even if purely because of social conditioning or whatever) it is significantly different from most other kinds of human activity. So, the commodification of sex isn't exactly the same as the commodification of cooking, cleaning or teaching for example. It isn't completely different either, and it's important to recognise the similarities between different kinds of work, but not to the extent that we erase the differences that do exist.

~J.

I know things have moved on a bit but still wanted to respond to this

I'm not sure I'd break it down that way but I had been thinking a bit about this while writing that post, but thought it would get too messy to go into it. I think you're right that expectations of genders are not the same as conditioning. Often they just affect how behaviours are interpreted. So, for example, women are said to talk too much, but women who talk as much as men are perceived as talking more than the men because in fact men talk more in mixed gender conversations. And men and women exhibiting the same behaviour are often perceived as confident or pushy respectively. But the expectations also affect the behaviour. Science being thought of as a man's subject means more men go into science.

Sure, by resistant I didn't just mean in the active sense, I also meant "unaffected by" (like water-resistant). Whether men and women are aware of patriarchy or not, their personalities aren't completely created by gender conditioning. Everyone has personality traits that aren't what you'd expect for someone socialised as their gender, some more than others, for many other reasons than a conscious resistance to patriarchal socialisation. As such, I don't think it's accurate to say men are abhorrent.

On the subject of sex work I think D's points are spot on. Sex work is like any other work in it's structure, and I don't think there's anything fundamentally different about it from an economic perspective. But if we're looking at it from a psychological, cultural or social etc perspective then there are differences. I think, coming back to the question of punters, that it's those differences that mean that they're doing something unconscionable. Just how bad it is, and what kind of person it makes them, are ethical questions that I don't really have answers to, but I do think having sex with someone who doesn't want to have sex with you is a pretty shitty thing to do.

K, good points as always.

On this question I think you and D are right. But as people have previously pointed out on this thread, women are pressured into having sex with people when they may not want to not just as sex work but in relationships/marriages as well. So this still doesn't mark sex work out as something uniquely bad or exploitative.

What seriously, you think that's even a point of debate?!?

Of course men with any degree of feminist or communist analysis shouldn't buy sex (viewing pornography is another debate). But from there, it doesn't follow that encouraging a mass boycott is the sort of work communists should take in relation to the sex industry.

Nor does it follow that sex work is somehow, as Steven says, uniquely exploitative or that PIV sex is somehow the foundation of patriarchy.

You can’t say that sex work is just like any other wage labor and then go on to say that people that solicit sex are doing something heinous and are bad people. Prostitution isn’t some hobby of a sex worker it is their full or part time job. Even in the few countries where it is legal sex workers don’t receive salaries or adequate hourly wages. If they don’t have costumers they don’t get money and they need to eat and pay for housing. So basically in this formulation they would need to rely on an ever existing stream of nasty bad men, with an enlightened communist intelligentsia in the wings chastising the wayward masses like some sort of secular clergy.
This implies you do not consider sex work-particularly prostitution- to be just like any other work. Mother Jones may organize child workers but it is for the purpose of abolishing child labor. Women in sweatshop garment factories face horrific exploitation but nobody is arguing against abolishing making clothing either now or after the revolution, unlike here with sex work. Mining is physically exploitative and damaging both in the immediate sense and it kills one in the long term – much more heinous then anything in sex work – but no one claims that communities whose power comes from coal – and with their approval being its efficient and cheap – are dickheads and violent perverts. If anything the people called dickheads are the ones that shut down the mines, destroying the entire economic center of the region.
Also:

(I’m assuming this is a typo and you mean porno and cabarets will be around after revolution.) Porn is prostitution with a camera. It’s professional people getting paid to have sex with strangers only the stranger is also a professional and there are people watching/recording for others. Actors and Actresses in porn don’t get to choose their partners and they certainly don’t “enjoy” – in an intimate way, I mean – it. Men in porn are typically hired because they have an unusual capability of keeping a prolonged erection – which should give you an idea of the physical/sexual strain they are required in their labor.
If anything, from a moralistic perspective (‘sex for money is degrading’), prostitution is much more ‘humane’ then pornography. In prostitution generally, the task performed is just a variation of sex and a prostitute isn’t likely to suffer consequences if they refuse an outlandish request from the customer (or maybe the boss is violent or reprimanding, but usually all they accept limits to the sexual acts that are performed). In porno, given market competition and its general legality means mass proliferation, doing over the top things and things that are ‘degrading’ (and I man this for softcore as well as hardcore) is part of ‘doing your job’ and an industry norm. And this is then watched by thousands/millions of people for their voyeuristic pleasure. Even after you’re long dead and gone. And

This is the defense people caught with kiddie porn use. ‘They didn’t pay for it/ they didn’t molest kids/would never do it in real life’. And they are often speaking the truth, but by consuming the images, even for free, they create a market for child porn. So if paying for sex is bad, if people show interest in watching people have sex businesses will stand to make a profitable enterprise with it.

Most ‘amateur’ porn seems to me to be either images hacked from peoples personal accounts (photopbucket and so on) or its images uploaded to the internet by vengeful boyfriends/girlfriends out of revenge. In fact I get the sense – maybe I’m making unfair generalizations- that people get enjoyment of ‘amateur’ porn (because obviously regular porn has better production values) precisely because of the perceived humiliation (something that was meant to be intimate/private is shared with the whole world). I even once knew a teenager (he’s dead now)- a friend of my friends during childhood- who uploaded nude photos of a girl who he was friends with, not because of spite (unless I have a distorted version of a story)- they were still friends- but what I can only assume was his sexual pleasure at sharing/humiliating her with other men.
As for the real exhibitionists, isn’t exhibitionism considered a mental disorder? I mean one might, depending on ones taste, find a pretty naked lady or bloke enjoyable but it’s still the same as the ‘homeless man in a trenchcoat’ trope. I don’t think I have a problem with it but it doesn’t seem healthy.

So my point is if you feel prostitution is problematic, then pornography is problematic. If they are problematic then why would you not fight its existence right now instead of waiting for after the revolution. People didn't tolerate child labor and it was certainly relatively financially beneficial for their families- still would be- to send kids to work in a factory/service industry than primary school (with is just a state run babysitting service/indoctrination center for most workers anyway).

By that logic communists should support wars so the soldiers can keep their jobs.

~J.

Yes you can. We are saying that barring extreme circumstances, those with feminist and communist analyses shouldn't solicit sex. But that since it will take a total transformation of social relations to change the nature of sexuality in society, a communist approach to the sex industry should be a material one (legalization, health and safety) and not a moralistic one ('degrading', abolition, etc.).

Welcome to capitalism. Again, you're trying to turn the sex industry into some extreme example when it's just not.

One, you don't know that, some very well might. Or it might be a case where they enjoy some elements of the job and find other horrifically exploitative--just like workers in any other industry.

Two, although they may not enjoy it in an 'intimate' way, some may still prefer it to other types of waged labour. By seeking it's abolition, you're actually further limiting the shitty choices we have to make about work (and, of course, some people are coerced into the sex industry--but other choose it just as 'freely' as any other type of employment).

As I 've already told DA (he never responded), there's a spectrum of sexual 'degradation' in a variety of female dominated industries:

Take the airline industry, for example, where sexual attractiveness is basically part of the job description. What about temping agencies where acceptance of sexual harrassment is a given if you want to keep your job? Is that not direct sexual exploitation? ?

And I think this about sums up your take on things. You're trying to wrap up your moralizing in some absurd psychological explanation.

I mean, the same as the man in the trench coat? A person who forces himself on others is the same as someone who willingly shows themselves to others who are specifically searching it out? That's the same?

Also, I like your addition of 'homeless' here--just throwing some classism into the mix for good measure.