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.”
I’ve been marinating on your response here. There’s something off about it that I’m having trouble putting words to. I think maybe the “offness” that I’m sensing is that your comment sort of treats men as humans and everyone else as potential trafficking victims. I don’t think you meant to do this, I suspect (hope) you don’t actually believe that non-men are not human in the same way men are, but this comment of yours still kind of reads like that.
For instance, you end it with the following line:
This line really rankles, for two reasons. One, there are women who have read your comment and it just feels weird to tell a woman, especially a marxist woman, to fix her views toward women. Two, there are people who have read your comment who don’t want a girlfriend, because they’re not into women, because they have a long-term partner already and are monogamous, or because they’re ace or aromantic. (Probably other reasons too.) And yet, here you are, implicitly acting like everyone reading your comment is a straight man. But we aren’t. I’m not. The people arguing with you in this thread about sex work aren’t. You’ve made an incorrect (and sexist) assumption about the people reading your comment.
This reads slightly like concern trolling, but I will respond anyway. The issue is important.
I do not assume that everyone reading my comment is a straight man; rather I assume that most people defending sex work will be straight men. Long experience with The Online Left has made me very cynical in this regard; as Deng Xiaoping said, “seek truth from facts,” and a whole lot of pro-prostitution rhetoric is eerily similar to arguments incels make. You cannot seriously tell me you’ve never run into a straight, cismale “leftist” whose “support” for sex workers was ultimately about getting (as someone else in this thread put) a “Revolutionary People’s Prostitution Office;” such individuals are a plague in our circles. Genderwise, this thread may be an exception to the general rule – it is hardly a total exception – but it does not disprove said rule. Any experience with the internet or (indeed) real-life left will show you that.
But neither are women and queer people automatically immune to this nonsense. Just as you have right-wing trans people like Blaire White, and other women who support MAGA and “redpill” philosophy, so you get plenty of women and queer people on the left who support sexist positions ultimately not in their interests. (I remember, not too fondly, when Merrick DeVille’s reinvention of comfort women was a hotly debated topic in leftist forums). The assumption that identity always equals ideology, and that being part of an oppressed minority leads therefore, always and in every case, to a correct interpretation of material reality, is wrong and ignores the existence of false consciousness. But only Marxists-Leninists seem really to talk about such things.
I am perfectly aware that men can be trafficked as well. However, the vast majority of trafficked people are women and girls. To ignore that, or to say that protections for women and girls should not be the main focus of anti-trafficking policy, is to engage in a sort of leftist reskinning of an infamous right-wing talking point: “You spend all this time talking about how Black people are victims of racism in the US, but did you know that white people can also be victims of racially-motivated crimes?” Certainly they can, but the problem is not anywhere near comparable, or anything like so institutionalized. Similarly, to focus on protections for women and girls, from a problem that they disproportionately face, is not in the least to deny them agency.
Lastly, the institutionalization of sex work is far more characteristic of fascist regimes than socialist ones. Stalin, Mao, and Kim Il-Sung abolished prostitution and pornography. Mussolini’s Italy was content to regulate the existing the brothel system. The Nazis similarly had military brothels, from which women of “impure blood” were excluded. We know about Imperial Japan and “comfort women”, and there have been reports of similar things happening in today’s Ukraine. South Korean “democracy activists” have tried to smuggle porn into the DPRK, apparently under the belief that it is a social rot which will help undermine society from within. Are we to believe that these regimes, regressive in every way, were progressive and better than socialist states on this one issue? That seems dubious, to put it mildly.
Thanks for the response, legitimately. I haven’t done enough reading and thinking to have a principled position on sex work. I really don’t know where I stand. I really should read more about and by sex workers, because these issues are indeed important.
I do want to say that I haven’t actually seen leftists wanting prostitution for the same reasons as incels. I’m not saying this doesn’t happen, I’m sure it does in some circles and I’m certainly not trying to cast doubt on your assertions that you’ve seen it. I believe you have. But I haven’t, not from people I’d class as reasonable leftists. Part of this, of course, is I just don’t go out in public much or talk to very many people, and when I do, the topic of sex work doesn’t come up. So you and I have very different experiences with the types of people we’ve seen defend sex work, and I think that difference is relevant here. I think I’m much more likely than you to assume that someone I see arguing a pro-sex-work position is doing so not because they’re reactionary or misogynist, but actually from a place of genuine feminism. Because those are the kinds of defenses I’ve seen most often, including in this very thread. Also, and this is a small thing, but unless I’ve missed someone, none of the people talking to you about sex work in this thread are cis men. So yeah, this thread is a total exception to the general rule that people defending sex work are mostly cis men.
Another very small thing I disliked about the first comment of yours I responded to is the line “Orgasms do not increase productive forces.” I don’t believe labor must necessarily exist for the sole purpose of increasing productive forces. Art, conversation, hell, even cooking a nice meal are all examples of labor that doesn’t increase productive forces. So to say that sex work is bad because orgasms are unnecessary, well, I just don’t think that follows. I don’t really see how that argument is any different to the argument that says a barista isn’t really a worker just because they’re not producing something.
Ultimately, I don’t know if this conversation is worth continuing much longer. I haven’t done enough thinking and reading to say anything beyond what I’ve said, so I think I’ll probably bow out here. I mostly commented to point out the unfortunate reality that so many people on the internet make the (shitty, sexist) assumption that everyone they’re interacting with is a straight man. And I want that assumption to die already. I admit I did slightly misread your initial comment and I see now that you weren’t exactly making that assumption, I just read my own shit into what you were saying. You’re also proudly ML (I can’t fault you for that), but since I’m coming from hexbear, the fairly extreme anti-anarchist sentiment in your first paragraph was a bit off-putting. But hey, that’s fine, this thread is on lemmygrad, not hexbear.
Sorry, much of this response is me trying to work through what I found off-putting about your initial comment. There’s likely not a lot worth engaging with here. Still, I’m going to post it because I’ve spent 10 minutes writing it. (I need to stop procrastinating the actual work I need to be doing today! Life is hard!)