Anti-sex work feminism, a history thread: For about 2 centuries, middle-class etc women have been involved in campaigns about prostitution. Many had heart-felt reasons, & there were even campaigns to decriminalize prostitution & ensure better rights for women who sold sex. BUT...
For the most part, these campaigns were about public morality, social control, and the maintenance of a system of cheap, feminised labour that served the interests of the wealthy. They denigrated and criminalized women’s attempts to make a living wage by selling sex...
while celebrating their own ‘rescue efforts’: that is, retraining women to work in domestic service. It was a lucrative business in an age of domestic labour shortage: getting young women, in the words of historian April Haynes, ‘out of brothels and into kitchens’.
A feminism that advocates for selling sex to be pushed underground & made more dangerous, but sees no problem with hiring women to scrub their toilets for nothing close to a living wage, belongs in the very distant past. I hope one day it will truly be history.
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