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A big thank you to Francois Tremblay over at The Prime Directive for such a clear and concise break down of why its okay to hate prostitution and work to end it.  He knocks this one out of the park in his post titled “The assumption sex is power“.

“In prostitution and pornography (which is, after all, organized prostitution), the imbalance is, at least on the surface, financial in nature; johns and porn directors trade money for sex, either with themselves or other people (and for those who object that pornography cannot be prostitution because porn directors don’t make actresses have sex with them, some johns have prostituted women have sex with each other too). Prostituted women and porn actresses are often coerced into unwanted sexual acts so they can get the money they need, and are exposed to high risks of sexually transmitted diseases, extremely high death rates, and extremely high percentages of PTSD (equal or higher to that of war veterans).

As has been pointed out by feminists, making women have sex with you by giving them money means they wouldn’t want to have sex with you in the first place. They’re doing it because they need the money, which makes it non-consensual. Furthermore, if consent is granted beforehand, and cannot be given or revoked for specific sexual acts as they happen, then it’s not consensual either, simply because it’s then very easy for a john or a porn director to decide to add new sexual acts and force the woman to do them under the threat of not getting paid.

And all of that is predicated on a capitalist society which makes work contracts and organized prostitution possible, as well as normalize the position that everything is potential property, including people’s sexuality.

But the more profound power imbalance, I think, is psychological: psychologically healthy men who have no qualms exploiting women who have been abused in childhood and devalue their own sexuality, or otherwise have bought into their “womanly” duty.

I can already hear the pro-prostitution advocates hissing like the snakes that they are, “see, you do hate sex workers!” I don’t hate prostituted women, I listen to the voices of ex-prostituted women who speak up about their experiences and who tell us that it was their devaluation of their own sexuality that led them to accept prostitution as a way of life. Pro-prostitution advocates tell us to listen to the voices of prostituted women, but they want you only to listen to the privileged white women who got what they wanted out of prostitution and then joined pimp-led advocacy groups. Of course such women have a vested interest in hiding the truth.

But to pro-prostitution advocates, anyone who disagrees must hate “sex workers.” To pro-pornography advocates, anyone who disagrees must hate porn actresses. As if hating an industry means hating the people who work at the lower echelons! Hating capitalism has never meant hating the workers, it means hating the institutions that exploit the workers. I hate prostitution and pornography and the people who defend those institutions, not the women whose sexuality is exploited by them. The power is generated by those institutions, not by a woman taking her clothes off.” 

Go over to the Prime Directive and check out the rest of FT’s work, you won’t be sorry.