Monday, March 10, 2008

Even Conservatives Keep Using Sex Workers. Doesn't This Prove Eradication Impossible?

Surely, I can't be arguing that anti-sex, misogynist conservative Americans are really alright with sex work? Well, frankly yes. In fact, I believe that the majority of anti-sex misogynist men in that culture have visited a sex worker at some point, but that's sheer speculation.

Conservative America, for religious reasons, out of a sexist distaste for women who don't go find themselves a husband to tell them what to do and stay completely faithful to him for the next few decades, and because of a general fear of unsanctioned sex which stems from religion, are certainly adamantly against sex work, or so it seems at first.

However, conservative America, with its more blatant and intense variety of misogyny, tendency to trap people in marriages into which they would never have entered had they been allowed to have sex any other way, and high rate of closeted homosexuality is in fact the perfect breeding ground for sex work. (Note that I am not saying marriage woes are justification for paying sex workers, just that they make the behavior more likely.) Sex work is needed here in order to keep a dysfunctional society functioning, in order to keep people from feeling the need to come out of the closet, leave their wives with the full realization that abstinence education had caused them to marry the wrong person at the wrong time, and so on.

Why would a society which needs some women to be sex workers constantly harp on them with violent, religiously-tinged invective? I imagine it's because conservatives see in the existence of sex workers proof that their societal model doesn't actually work (they're probably right here) and need somebody to blame. Women are an easy scapegoat. After all, conservatives already don't like us.

I am not a conservative, as I have stated. I do not believe in suppressing sex along with sex work or with teaching women that they have no power outside of their use to men and then forbidding them to use that power. I have an actual and intellectually honest interest in getting rid of sex work because I have an actual interest in creating a society which does not rely on its existence. This is very different and should not be mistaken for somehow echoing the conservative anti-sex work attitudes.

An anti-sex work approach which is not religious or conservative in nature and does not attempt to punish sex workers for the decisions that were made for them has almost never been tried on a large scale simply because it's never been all that popular. To try and connect my idea of a sex-work free society to that of conservatives or to insist that their failure to bring about this societal change is my failure as well is nothing short of willful equivocation in an attempt to discredit me by association.

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