question: if a man pays a woman to have sex with him is she really consenting? How is it not rape??
you said in your tags that you really want an answer, so here you go:
we consent to sex for a variety of reasons, all of which are ultimately transactional in some way. i consent to sex with a partner because i think they have a nice butt and i want to touch it, because i think she’ll give me an orgasm, because i have a migraine and sex might help, because i love them and sex will cement or express that love. in all of these cases, i am consenting to sex because it will net me a particular benefit (or I predict that it will) – consenting to sex because it gets you something you want is not an inherently problematic thing. consenting to sex because the gain i hope to reap is specifically financial or material, is not ultimately different from consenting to sex because of a gain that is not those things.
when anti-sex work feminists make an equivalence between traded sex and rape, they are also showing a fundamental misunderstanding of what the trade of sex is like. just because i have “entered the state of being known as ‘prostitute’” does not mean that it is possible to simplistically buy my consent. if i’m sitting in a restaurant with my friends, or doing my grocery shopping, or sitting in a theater, you can’t walk up to me, throw an hour’s-rate’s worth of bills at me and expect me to bend over and drop my panties on command. the rate you pay me influences my decision to consent, but it does not purchase it – i consent for a nuanced spectrum of reasons: i consent to sex for x amount of money, with someone who has passed my screening, at a place and time when I decide I am working, with the methods of safer sex I prefer, the particular sex acts I am comfortable with, et cetera. The removal of any of these conditions negates my consent – someone who pays me but removes the condom is committing rape, someone who gives me money but accosts me when I’m not working is committing rape, someone who gives me money and then ignores my boundaries about what we do together is committing rape. This is because a client has not and can not buy my blanket consent – you can’t actually buy consent, ironically is the place where rad fems and I technically agree. Someone who is paying me is agreeing to one of the conditions I have set on my consent to sex (and all consent is of course conditional – blanket consent to sex is a contradiction in terms). The fact that one of my conditions is money doesn’t change anything about that.
And, it’s not in direct answer to your question, but it’s worth talking about when this conversation comes up – when anti sex work feminists talk about sex work as being inherently and always rape, they remove the ability of sex workers to talk about actual rape and assault they experience on the job. If all sex work is rape, then there’s no meaningful difference between my favorite client whose company I enjoy, who treats me with respect and kindness, who never goes near my boundaries, and always tips generously, and someone violently assaults me and takes my money. And some radical feminists might say that I’m the one who doesn’t get that there’s no difference between those two people, but from here, the gulf is huge.
Consent, to me, isn’t the ability to say yes but the ability to say no; my ‘yes’ is meaningless if it’s the only answer I could give. In my current working situation, I have the ability to say no to the next potential client who comes along, and that’s why it’s consensual. It hasn’t always been this way, though. Poverty absolutely constrains choices to the point that it makes consent impossible (which is, I should note, very different from negating *agency*). If an individual made me choose between having sex and being homeless, no one would hesitate to call that rape, because it’s a heavily constrained choice– it’s coercion. When I started doing survival sex work, this was essentially the scenario I was in. It was absolutely traumatic in a way consistent with past experiences of sexual abuse. I had to take every session that came to me. I quite literally could not afford to say ‘no’. Of course, there was no individual forcing me to choose between sex work and homelessness. I was raped, but there was no perpetrator, which is why it’s fair to say that no one should be criminalized. The closest there is to a ‘perpetrator’ here is our atomized neoliberal capitalist society, which is only strengthened by policing.
That’s the other thing. Even if you want to argue that all clients are morally responsible for abuse-by-poverty– which, I’d like to point out, means that all of us are responsible, since we all consume labor from coerced workers when we purchase things like t-shirts and coffee– that’s not automatically an argument for criminalization. The safety of victims and potential victims should be paramount when crafting laws, and there is overwhelming evidence that criminalization harms everyone trading sex. I’m against mandatory arrest laws for domestic violence for similar reasons: they cause more harm. Please move past this idea that policing and incarceration are the end-all-be-all when it comes to justice.
So, you were close, OP. It might very well be rape for someone to exchange money for sex, depending on the circumstances of the person receiving. But it’s not the individual paying who’s at fault; the system is at fault. Get rid of male demand and you will still have female poverty, you will have homelessness and starvation, which is absolutely abuse because we have the resources to avoid it. We just refuse to distribute resources evenly. That’s where you should be expending your energy, on changing our abusive economic system. Because all. survival. work. is. abusive.
This:
when anti sex work feminists talk about sex work as being inherently and always rape, they remove the ability of sex workers to talk about actual rape and assault they experience on the job. If all sex work is rape, then there’s no meaningful difference between my favorite client whose company I enjoy, who treats me with respect and kindness, who never goes near my boundaries, and always tips generously, and someone violently assaults me and takes my money. And some radical feminists might say that I’m the one who doesn’t get that there’s no difference between those two people, but from here, the gulf is huge.
Excellent description of a truly as yet unexplored aspect of women, any type of sexual expression and actual contemporary life.
BRAVA 👏🏽💌👏🏽!
Woah. This made me think!
Published
As small as the world 