Can You Be Empowered on a Dying Planet?

Claiming prostitution is empowering is feminism's death rattle on a planet on the brink

Two years ago, I had a very long conversation with a friend about whether or not sex work qualifies as the same kind of prostitution of any salaried work. His Marxist position was that any form of hiring out one’s labour is equally exploitative under capitalism, and the particular aversion we may have to prostitution is, in fact, thinly-veiled misogyny. My counter was not particularly well-thought out or eloquent, but instinctive. While I agreed with his position that pretending slaving away for capitalists without being in any way adequately remunerated for the value produced is somehow morally superior was spurious, to say the least, there was something I couldn’t quite put my finger on about the particularity of selling the female body as a product.

I’ve thought about that conversation often in the years since, especially as subscriber-funded pornography websites have created avenues for women to own their own “means of production”, so to speak. Women can now bypass pimps, the pornography industry, and male managers, all of whom previously skimmed the surplus value these women produced. In short, the money is theirs, every single dime. Perhaps this is why “bops”, barely legal 18-year-olds, are turning to sites like OnlyFans instead of chasing after an education, in the hope they may become one of the lucky ones earning tens of millions every year. “Bop houses” are now popping up in California where these young adult content creators can live under the same roof and create videos together, many of which don’t amount to what we might once have considered porn—scantily clad bodies bouncing around is the currency of most social media these days. Some of the highest paid creators on these sites claim to be virgins.

Sex work is now considered empowering by online feminism, partly due to these very material factors which are helping women make buckets of cash from the safety of their rooms. But it’s also because online feminism is dictated by the same structures which govern all our online lives: algorithms and echo chambers. Very little discourse happens online, and even less nuanced argument. The online intellect is as binarised as the computer it lives on: you are either with us or against us. These factors have converged to create a form of feminism in which the very fact of being a women is a virtue in and of itself, and so anything a woman chooses to do is by default good. Nay—empowered.

Whatever a woman chooses to do with her body is empowering, we are told. This slogan is utterly bereft of any analysis of the superstructure of inequality which demands we sell ourselves to survive; that our survival, within a predatory ecosystem, is a competition against others also trying to survive. She may no longer have a pimp in the form of a man who beats her and steals from her, but capitalism is a pimp which steals our surplus value, dictates when we work, and reduces us down to our smallest constituent parts in order to best perform whatever function it allows us. Online feminism, like liberal feminism before it, tells women that financial liberation is emancipation. But financial liberation under capitalism demands those who want to win play by the rules. It is emancipation with a price, normally paid by the wider community, either the legions of workers exploited by the capitalist class, or the second sex who have too long been reduced to a sexual or reproductive resource.

A young woman put it brilliantly to me last week: “Sex work has been gentrified.” Once the profession of the desperate, and particularly of the poor, prostitution has become the playground for young, middle class, and overwhelmingly white women who think they can sell their bodies to buy their freedom, a freedom centred on further playing the role of the good consumer. Homes, cars, bags, trips; their exploitation is rewarded with consumption, consumption which demands the maintenance of the superstructure of inequality which provides the wealthy world with cheap goods stolen from Earth’s body and made with undervalued labour. This is the cost for their financial liberation because if there was nothing to spend such wealth on there would be no reason to produce it. And when wealth of such enormity is being produced, it is never just one body on the line. It is all of ours.

The past year of research for my book has helped me begin to articulate that instinct that grumbled from deep within me two years ago. Online feminism forgets that we are all interconnected. It forgets that financial liberation under capitalism demands the majority lose. It forgets that the celebration of objectifying women will trickle down into how the rest of us are perceived and treated. It forgets that anything which further perpetuates a culture of exploitation has enormous ramifications in an economic system which views the very body of the Earth as something to be stripped bare. It forgets that none of us are free until all of us are.

French filmmaker, theorist and sex worker Virginie Despentes understood this connection beautifully. In her scorching book, King Kong Theory, she warned that the reason, historically, why the most virulent anti-prostitution advocates are wealthy women is because they know the prostitutes are coming for their jobs as wives. She argued prostitutes and wives fulfil the same function in a world of male power: money on demand for sex on demand. In many ways, she is right. There is no liberty in a world of external value when that value is applied to bodies—and then strips them of it.

Our planet is suffering under that same value system, stripped bare, mined apart, caged, poisoned. How can any single person claim to be empowered on a dying planet, let alone by participating in the same evaluative reduction of her own body to do so? Perhaps she feels powerful, a fairly normal reaction to increasing one’s personal wealth at the cost of the wider community. She is a conqueror, not a feminist. And all she has been allowed to conquer is herself. She is the apex of individuality, selling her capitulation to exploitation as collective politics.

Sometimes it is even sold as a method of collective politics. Young women are being encouraged to refuse to sleep with men without being financially remunerated for their time. This is considered dating, not prostitution. Women explain online how to get men to pay one’s bills or rent or pay for one’s upkeep like hair and nails and makeup. Again, this brand of “empowerment” feeds a culture of consumption of both Earth’s body and women’s bodies, it promulgates a reduction of women’s value to the direct financial evaluation of their bodies. The regime of exploitation may be flirting with us by offering money for the resource it prizes so dearly, but its goal is always the same: enclosure. In Afghanistan, women are no longer allowed to make eye contact with men.

The very idea of individual empowerment is an ignorant justification of self-satisfaction. Pretending that such empowerment can be secured through prostitution, and in particular the selling of the female body, in a regime which attains its power through the exploitation of Earth’s reproductivity, is dangerous. It is of absolutely no surprise to me that as exploitation of Earth ramps up the exploitation of women’s bodies ramps up too. Soberly, it isn’t particularly surprising to see it being spearheaded by women. If we do not fight for Earth’s liberation, our own will only ever be just that—individual, isolated, costly.

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