Happens about February-March of every election year (the, ahem, independent media goes out of its way to induce it). Get ready for the next lib wave, and a bunch of iterations of the following script, which they’ve been practicing since like 1999:
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- “Eh, I disagree with [Democrat candidate] on a lot of things, but to pretend he’s not better than [Republican candidate] is just delusional.”
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- “Yeah, I know [Democratic candidate] is a war criminal and complicit in a genocide, but have you considered that [Republican candidate] is a war criminal as well, plus he said rude things about [minority group]? In the interest of harm reduction for Americans only, I have a duty to vote Democrat.”
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- “Your vote actually does matter.”
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- “The only reason the Democrats aren’t Wholesome Progressive Scandinavian Model Chungus is because they have to play politics with the Republicans. You have to recognize the reality of a two-party system.”
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- “We can push the Democrats left.”
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- “Such-and-such Democratic policy (usually the Affordable Care Act) was actually really progressive.”
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- “My [minority group] partner, whom I’ve never mentioned up to this point and very possibly just made up, is voting Democrat.” (This tactic also gets used by libs defending porn and/or prostitution, e.g. “my totally-real girlfriend loves it when I post videos of us having sex online”).
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- “If even one less person dies because [Democratic candidate] is in office, it’s my moral duty to vote for [Democratic candidate]. I am a mature, compassionate person who absolutely understands socialism.”
This is the crux of my problem with the language around this topic on this site. I don’t think you’ll find anyone here that disagrees with empowering workers and fighting workplace exploitation. I do disagree with the idea that women’s “sexual purity” is something to be owned and protected by men, and it’s very easy to infer that motivation from some of the emphasis often used around this topic.
I’m not accusing you of that motivation, but I think people are right to be sensitive to it. You can very easily find “real workers” and “real Marxists” whose hatred of “prostitution and pornography” specifically manifests as a hatred of women that have sex outside of a heterosexual monogamous relationship for the purpose of procreation. From there, it’s a pretty short jump to “the LGBTQ movement is Western liberal bourgeois decadence”, “abortion is antinatalism depriving the Party of future revolutionaries”, and other reskinned conservative opinions.
Just as it wouldn’t be fair of me to assume the worst of you, I don’t think it’s fair of you to assume that anyone sensitive to language that most often precedes a call for more police are straight men that want a Revolutionary People’s Prostitution office.
You seem to be arguing in good faith, so I’ll provide I detailed breakdown.
I hear this language from a lot of leftists who are pro-sex work, and it always seems to me a little nebulous. There are societies where men “owning and protecting a woman’s sexual purity” means something; they are generally pre-industrial societies, or societies ruled by a religious authority, not modern western societies. There is certainly sexism in the modern west, but it expresses itself in a different form: often as women experiencing social pressure to become, as it were, common sexual property. The women who give in are then shamed for not being the ideal autonomous individual of liberalism. This, not religion or any leftovers of religion, is the real root of the modern phenomena of “slut-shaming.”
I am suspicious for this reason even of things like OnlyFans. While they provide some agency for sex workers, and some modicum of protection, their long term tendency or goal seems to be turning women into luxury commodities for the wealthy. This is not liberation.
Please note also that, when I spoke of workers’ concern that their “wife, girlfriend, mother, sister” fall into the clutches of a predatory industry, I spoke also of the workers concern for themselves – i.e., I was including female workers. Furthermore, there is nothing inherently patriarchal about a straight male worker being concerned that a female worker is being sexually exploited. It is class solidarity, though it may be expressed in terms that we as Marxists should strictly speaking disagree with – most workers have not gone to college, and do not know the latest trendy lingo.
In Marxists, this is the result of bad education; in workers, it is false consciousness. (Though in my experience, the number of Marxists who hold such views is minimal, and dwarfed by the brocialists whose idea of women’s liberation is “shut up and suck my dick while I talk to Tyler over here about Trotsky”). But this false consciousness is not totally at odds with reality, in that it reflects, as if in a distorting mirror, certain mechanisms of capitalist oppression. Abortion in capitalist societies is often a tool of eugenics. Western governments often “pinkwash” austerity policies, thus throwing queer people under the bus, but also deliberately presenting to workers the LGBTQ+ movement as something opposed to their interests. And so on.
This is fair criticism, though I have run into a whole lot of pro-prostitution brocialists in real life.
Didn’t have the sense to save it but there was this hilarious meme where it was like the IQ bell curve with conservatives on the low IQ end “Sex work is bad because it is deg----ate” then the top of the curve were the liberal “No sex work is good” and at the end were the high IQ marxist “Sex work is bad because it is work”