Rethinking Prostitution: A feminist critique of consent

Rethinking Prostitution: A feminist critique of consent  

By Alexia Katsiginis 

‘In this line of thought, a sex worker doesn’t consent to sex; she is coerced because of her situation.’

This essay aims to respond to arguments that assert prostitution is ‘empowering’ and offers women the right to ‘choose’ what they do with their bodies. In a country where 3600 women are raped a day, where  patriarchy is as entrenched in our culture as our flag and where prostitution steadily enters a liberal’s argument it is necessary to reassess what it means to give consent. Apart from the obvious problem that rape is still considered through the male gaze, I am more interested in how our understanding of consent in the context of prostitution acts as a fiction to justify the violent exploitation of women.

When a woman's economic position forces her into prostitution, surely it is unethical to consider her consent as freely given? Surely it makes better sense to conclude that she is being exploited by an order, which has offered her an ultimatum between poverty and accepting her constructed identity and value as a woman? Relying on the fiction of 'consent' allows us to de-politicize prostitution and consider it simply as a business transaction. In so doing we distance the ideals of prostitution from our social order and are able to accept it as a defect of society -a violent attack on our moral code, waged by the sexually perverted and promiscuous (or if you're feeling liberal, those who desire to be rich while indulging their laziness).

When a social space mobilizes power in a way that subjugates a particular group, that mobilization needs to be legitimized by a body of knowledge in order for it to remain unchallenged. In society, the exploitative functioning of patriarchy is masked by normalized practices (such as gender roles and chivalry) that justify and de-politicize our daily interactions -in this way the power to subjugate is protected. 

In prostitution, however, it is the free-market economy that protects this power and disposes the need to rely on the ideological functioning of the above normalized practices. The body of knowledge that exits in the social sphere has naturalized neo-liberalism as the only possible economic order and therefore legitimized prostitution (and its power dynamic) as a natural consequence of 'choosing your trade'.

Prostitution therefore becomes defined as a matter of neo-liberalism instead of patriarchy; allowing us to distance the possible exploitation of the prostitute from the violence in our own society.

On the contrary, the sex industry must be understood as a mirror of the exploitation that the 'other' endures at the hand of the patriarch. Unlike the social, prostitution needn't perpetuate the illusion of respect and equality between the prostitution and the Jon as it finds justification in the free-market economy. The absence of this need allows it to represent the relationship between men and women without the ideological mask that sustains the social order. Prostitution is an expression of our true relationship with the social, a representation of the social without the 'grid or lens' that legitimizes and de-politicizes our relationship with the 'other'.

It follows that support of this industry is not support of prostitution as an expression of sexual liberation but rather a desperate need to justify and legitimize our own patriarchal interactions. The unspoken entitlement to the other's body is fostered in the social and merely expresses its violence through the sex industry. It is therefore incorrect to understand this industry, whether it be pornography, prostitution or human trafficking, as a failure to adhere to our moral code. Instead we must consider it as constructed by our social ethos and acknowledge its dependence on a particular body of knowledge, patriarchy.

The solution, therefore cannot rely on laws that regulate the sex industry, such laws merely create the impression of progress. 

If sexual exploitation relies on the knowledge that informs patriarchy, then liberating the victims of this industry (and of society) can only occur after deconstructing this knowledge and reconstructing it in such a way that affords women their subjectivity and entitles them to something more than two  letters in front of the word 'man'.