Discussions of enthusiastic consent are about the sex that young, middle-class white people have
Is the claim that sex should always be consensual compatible with the claim that sex work is just a job like any other job? A blogger asks.
One could write a book on the contradictions inherent in the pro-prostitution stance – Janice Raymond did just that – but there may be no single greater inconsistency than the dual love liberals have for both paid sex and the notion of “enthusiastic consent.”
Most jobs don’t build in claims about the need for consent, because that’s the nature of jobs. Jobs are about being paid to do something someone else wants done.
Sexual encounters should be given the go-ahead with more than just a nod of agreement or shrug of the shoulders, and given that women so often provide even less than that, only to be fucked regardless, the responsibility to ensure equal interest and excitement falls specifically with the men who have traditionally ignored it.
How odd it is, then, to see this admirable focus on coercion-free, desire-driven sexual interaction so often championed by those who defend in the same breath a view of prostitution as free and consensual. Websites like Feministing, Jezebel, and others are strong proponents of both, as were the men and women of the queer community in which I spent my late teenage years. I would wager that most advocates of the “sex work is work” perspective would, if asked, praise the model of enthusiastic consent – even though, of course, the two positions are completely incompatible.
I’m not sure they’re completely incompatible. It’s possible at least in theory for someone to love sex work so much that consent just isn’t an issue, no matter how abusive the other party or parties, no matter how many hours the work is extended (remember that “all you can fuck” offer in the Berlin “Airport Pussy”). But they are in tension, at least.
The explanation for this wild divergence rests, like most contradictions, with the blindness of privilege. Discussions of affirmative, enthusiastic consent revolve around the sex that young, middle-class white people have, and the gulf between intimacy and violence is reserved for them and them alone. Other women – like, say, the millions who languish in prostitution without the luck of whiteness, wealth, or youth – aren’t so lucky.
For consent to have any meaning whatsoever, it must be enthusiastic. That such a tautology is needed at all reflects the low value masculine eroticism places on female comfort and safety, much less pleasure. But certainly the “enthusiasm” we aim for should come from anticipation, affection, and a sense of security and warmth – not simply the promise of relief from hunger and homelessness, purchased at the price of the body.
Or you could just shrug and say it’s no worse than working in a copper mine or a slaughterhouse. But I don’t think that’s a standard the left should be aiming for.
I see the point, but think there’s some equivocation going on here. Yes, a job is about paying people to do something that someone else wants done, and if the person ardently desired to do that thing anyway, then nobody would pay them and it wouldn’t be called a job. And yes, “enthusiastic” consent is an incongruous concept when obviously the sex wasn’t going to happen without the inducement of money.
But consent is a pretty damn important part of any job. You can pay me to work out in your dangerous factory, but the fact that I took your money doesn’t give you the right to demand that I work without safety equipment, or with unsafe equipment, or engage in risky work practices. You’re paying me to do a particular job that I agreed to, and you can’t interpret that as consent to do any damn thing you want me to. If the job involves physical contact, I still have to consent–and consenting to do one thing doesn’t mean consenting to do anything else the customer might want.
Specifically, it is certainly possible to rape a prostitute. The woman will tell you, “I agreed to do X, but not Y, and was made to do Y anyway.”
In this case I think “enthusiastic” is part of the problem. It’s a very useful way of cutting through the bullshit of supposed “misunderstandings,” but the real point is consent. It’s not about prosecuting people because one partner was fully consenting, but wasn’t doing backflips or waving sparklers or something.
I’d like to preface my comment by saying a friend was recently telling me good things about your work. This is my first time on this blog; I got there through a trackback and then recognized your name.
” It’s possible at least in theory for someone to love sex work so much that consent just isn’t an issue, no matter how abusive the other party or parties, no matter how many hours the work is extended”
A theoretical person (woman) who just LOVES sex, sex with men who show up wanting to pay *her*, and loves it for numerous hours is just that–theoretical. It has no application to the real world, which is why I so loathe all the made-up situations people concoct to justify prostitution. There’s just no way a person (woman) is going to be turned on by many, if not most or even all, of the men who come to her to buy access to her body. Many of the men haven’t showered or cleaned themselves and smell revolting. More often than not, they want to have types of sex the woman doesn’t want to do, even if she technically agrees to do them. And do you really think women working at oral-sex service stations, just love sucking the dick of random men and would do it all night? This is a male fantasy, the male idea of what prostitution is to woman, and blatantly false, which is why I hate to see it repeated here.
When we’re discussing prostitution, I think it’s imperative to keep our discussions based on reality as opposed to abstractions.
Finally, I’d like to comment on this:
“Or you could just shrug and say it’s no worse than working in a copper mine or a slaughterhouse”
I don’t understand why people love to compare prostitution to mining. If you were discussing copper mining or working in a slaughterhouse, would you say, “Or you could just shrug and say it’s no worse than prostitution”?
That said, I’m not entirely clear on what your views on buying sex are, and I will say, I don’t think working in a slaughterhouse should be a job at all.
It’s not quite that simple. Some people – lots, in fact – do have jobs that are exactly what they ardently want to do. But far from all do, and it’s not inherent in the nature of having a job.
The rest of what you say seems to overlook the nature of much sex work, as in that article in Der Spiegel that I blogged about the other day.
Cosima – oh but I didn’t say that to justify prostitution – I said it to acknowledge one of the arguments of people who do justify it. I think the argument is pretty weak, for the reasons you cite.
I’ve been writing about the subject this past week because of Amnesty International’s vote to support the decriminalization of sex work, including pimping. I’m not a fan of the Amnesty vote.
[…] contradiction in the Amnesty / free market position on prostitution, besides the one between “sex should be enthusiastically consensual” and “sex work is a job…, is that between intimacy and […]
Meanwhile, in the real world….
Salty Current, lots of “jobs” are much closer in practice to slavery. Most of the time, including the German brothels Ophelia described from Der Spiegel, are explicitly criminal in nature. In the example you linked to, government corruption aids and abets the perpetrators, and shields them from prosecution. In this case not only the employers, but also the regulators and the law itself, are criminal.
I’m pretty sure we’re in perfect agreement on these points, so your snark seems misplaced. More specifically, this has fuck-all to do with the fact that a woman can, if she wishes, consent to perform a sex act for payment, and if she does so consent, it would be ridiculous to argue that her lack of “enthusiasm” constitutes it “rape.” Women who are trafficked and coerced ARE being raped, but we’re talking about women who consent, not about women who are trafficked and then subjected to coercion (nor about women who are coerced by economic hardship; consent is impossible if coercion is involved).
[I’m not taking any specific position on this general issue.]
Indeed. In reality, where policy is made, a vanishingly small portion of people can consent in any meaningful sense to perform a sex act for payment. Or to do the work many people do in slaughterhouses. “Consent” to labor in the most dangerous, soul-sucking work in capitalism is coercion. Consent isn’t consent when the other options are awful, or when this is the only possible ticket to a better life.
I thought we were talking about prostitution in reality.
[I’m not taking any specific position on this general issue.]
I think the “enthusiastic consent” stuff is shading into strawmanning. How about just “assent”?
But that’s the point – “enthusiastic consent” is the standard, so why does the standard change for sex work? Why are the proponents of enthusiastic consent ignoring or concealing that change?
As long as sex is corrupted into a commodity that women ‘give,’ (or sell), the whole concept of ‘consent’ is intolerable. Yes, it is a step up from women being property, but not by much.
The whole ‘sex is a need’ line is rooted in deranged assumptions. Why is it only a need for men? Why is transactional and coercive sex associated with societies that are especially unequal and oppressive? Why does ‘sex work’ seem to be UNIVERSALLY associated with inferior status for women? Why do societies that tolerate prostitution also include gender apartheid in forms that discourage or prevent actual sex between actual people who have the autonomy to decide their own ‘needs?’
That’s kind of my point: ENTHUSIASTIC consent is a great way of communicating something important to dudebros, but it’s NOT the actual standard. If it were, every spouse who isn’t particularly in the mood but agrees anyway is a rape victim. Anyone who has ever been married knows that enthusiasm levels vary quite a bit. That you had sex without feeling like shaking pompoms and shouting, “give me an S! Give me an E! Give me an X! What’s that spell? Yaaaaay SEX!” doesn’t make one a rape victim.
This is one of those situations where generalities without examples invents a problem.
I’m familiar with a few pro-legalized-prostitution authors. Greta Christina is a good example. Greta does make a distinction between consensual sex work as opposed to unconsensual trafficking and institutionalized rape. And she’s very conscious of issues around privilege.
And as far as enthusiastic consent goes, Greta has a book called ‘Paying For It’ which consists of advice and anecdotes from sex workers, essentially giving their guidelines and preferences as to how they want to be treated. And some of them give examples of specific clients they have had that were respectful and treated them well as sex workers, and the tone and words of the accounts in those section make it clear that in many situations the consent of the sex workers is in fact enthusiastic.
So when I see quotes such as the section above, I get all annoyed, because I read it as an attack on people like Greta who do in fact go out of their way to make the relevant distinctions between consensual sex work and sex trafficking, and who take care to consider the expressed words and desires of actual sex workers.
But the problem with my annoyance is that, for the purpose of that quote, the author of it may very well be referring to authors with whom I am not familiar, who are fully deserving of that criticism.
It’s a bit like Phil Plait’s ‘Don’t be a Dick’ speech. I wasn’t personally familiar with assholes in the skeptic movement, so I interpreted the speech as an attack on the people I knew in the skeptic movement. It was only much later that I experienced the phenomenon of self-righteous skeptical assholes in the skeptic movement, and realized what Phil had been on about in the first place, and that my annoyance and irritation with him was misplaced.
I skimmed through the linked article. To my quick reading, lonesomeyogurt doesn’t actually cite any examples of the kind of authors she is criticizing. It’s annoying, because it makes the specifics of the article opaque, such that the article becomes very difficult to either be persuaded by it or to counter argue against it.