In my book Gender‑Critical Feminism, I argued that consuming the products of the sex industry is a paradigm example of unethical consumption. Discussion of unethical consumption focuses on injustices in the supply chain of a product, anywhere from the extraction of raw materials through to the selling by the final retailer, and looks at whether consumers can be justified in purchasing those products given the injustices. It does not focus, generally, on the rights of the sellers to sell, although in some cases these rights are relied on by those objecting to the argument that it is wrong to buy particular products.
The same can be said for the sex industry. What are the injustices in the supply chain of commercial sex, specifically, the end product of a discrete session of sexual acts, paid for by a john? Depending on the individual woman, there may be any of a range of injustices, human rights violations, and other harms.
There is human trafficking for prostitution. There are rapes. There are beatings. There is captivity/confinement. There is coercive control. There is psychological abuse. There is drug and alcohol addiction (whether a habit induced by pimps and traffickers, or a coping mechanism adopted by the sex worker herself). There are thefts, including refusals to pay. There is coercion/blackmail (e.g. police officers saying that they will arrest the sex worker if she does not service him for free). There is mistreatment by police and legal officials. There is social stigma, which may prevent sex workers from accessing physical and mental health services that are desperately needed. Any time a man buys sex, he risks having sex with a woman who has had, or is having, any number of these experiences.
Of course, not every purchase of sex, whether in prostitution or for pornography, involves the purchaser (or implicated third parties, e.g. the pimps, madams, traffickers, and brothel owners in prostitution; and the producers, film crew, and financers in pornography) in such harms to the sex worker. Similarly, not every purchase is of someone working in exploitative conditions (or whose history, which led to her being in those conditions, is exploitative). But it is not to the benefit of women that these purchases are made, and indeed may be much to their detriment, helping to keep sex hierarchy in place, both by securing the male “right to sex,” and by sustaining anti‑feminist propaganda (most pornography). Men who buy sex take unacceptable moral risks.
Women Alone—Or Women Together?
Some feminists argue that my view—that it is wrong to buy sex—violates the autonomy rights of individual women to sell sex. Angie Pepper writes, “I find the indirect attempt to remove the option of sex work for women morally pernicious. Not only does it violate women’s rights to choose for themselves whether they have sex and under what circumstances, it also violates their right to freedom of occupation. Whether one likes it or not, many sex workers prefer sex work to other forms of work and they have, as I have argued, a right to freely pursue such work.”
One way to answer that challenge is to ask what women owe to each other when it comes to achieving sex equality. Perhaps they owe each other enough that this loss of autonomy is justified.
What obligations do women have, and what costs can we reasonably expect them to bear, in the name of women’s liberation? This is just a specific version of a question that can arise for any oppressed group of people at any time in history. Individual members of those groups can simply accept the background conditions and try to get the best outcome possible for themselves within those parameters, or they can find a way to coordinate with others to fight for better conditions.
I reject the individualism of the rights‑based approach to prostitution in favour of a form of collectivism concerned with the social structures that perpetuate sex inequality, and with how we might break free of those structures. The only thing the liberal individualist can countenance as “normative” is what is good for individual women. Taking a collectivist approach means that questions about the normative shift to the level of the group.
At this point one may object—why are we only talking about women? We might accept for the sake of argument the shift from individualism to collectivism, but what determines that the relevant collective is women, rather than everyone? The restriction is merely pragmatic: those who are advantaged by hierarchical social arrangements—here men—can be expected to work to retain that advantage. That means they cannot be relied upon as supporters. That does not mean that some of their number won’t in fact be supporters. They probably will, just as some men were supporters of the suffragettes. But in strategizing about how to change social hierarchy, it is prudent to consider what the disadvantaged can do to free themselves.
So, the question becomes: if we accept that it is in women’s interests to disrupt the social structure that perpetuates their inequality, and that key parts of this social structure are prostitution and pornography, then what obligations does that confer on individual women? What kinds of costs can we reasonably expect each woman to bear?
What Women Owe To Each Other
Once we frame the issue this way, the assertion of the individual sex seller’s right to sell sex, as an exercise of her autonomy against the background conditions of sex hierarchy, starts to look a lot less compelling. The sex‑selling woman may lose an option, and that is a cost. But that is not an objection in itself. We might object if a woman is asked to take on disproportionate cost relative to other women, or if she is asked to take on an unreasonable amount of cost (one that impacts too severely on the rest of her life plan). It may be regrettable that any woman has to take on costs; but what is ultimately regrettable is that there is social hierarchy, and that those who benefit from it can’t be relied upon to cede their position in the name of equality. Members of the disadvantaged group taking on costs is just the price of ending oppression.
So, the question now is, in losing the option to sell sex, are individual sex sellers being asked to take on disproportionate or unreasonable cost?
Pepper might want to insist that a violation of the sex‑seller’s right to autonomy is something distinctive, not just a “cost” she can be asked to bear for the greater good of the group. But it is worth noting that she is defending a liberal position, and other liberals are not so categorical even about the values they take to be most fundamental, like liberty. John Stuart Mill, for example, gave a passionate defence of the liberty of the individual. Yet he still thought that individuals could be compelled to do things to the collective benefit, such as giving evidence in court, bearing a fair share of the country’s military defence, saving another person’s life, or intervening to stop a wrong being perpetrated against another person. If an individual can be compelled to give evidence in court, because having courts that hear evidence is the best way to secure justice for the society, then surely a woman can be asked to give up the option of selling sex, because eliminating the possibility of men buying sex from women is one necessary step along the pathway to a world where the sexes are equal.
The point may be clearer if we think about someone deliberately acting against a liberation movement. Suppose an individual woman in Britain in 1912 took to the streets in counterprotest of the suffragettes and their supporters. Her opinion on whether women should have the vote is a matter of her freedom of thought and expression, so she should not have been prevented from doing this. But we can still ask whether she was morally wrong (or right) to do this. Other women at the time were taking on very serious costs—such as the risk of being arrested and sent to prison—in order to increase women’s equality. Their sacrifices stood to increase autonomy for all women, not just at the time but into the future. If the individual woman we are thinking about acts so as to compromise the suffragettes’ project, then she acts against the interests, including the autonomy interests, of women. In doing so, she acts wrongly.
It may be unsettling to accept this as a parallel to the sex worker, for that may feel like putting blame in the wrong place. It’s true that if we were just approaching the topic of sexuality’s role in sex inequality, considering women as a collective and asking where to start in distributing obligations and asking individual women to take on costs, we wouldn’t be likely to start with sex workers.
Indeed, perhaps we’d make so much progress with other women that we’d never even get to sex workers. It’s a familiar thought that the most privileged women should be asked to take on the most cost. While I don’t agree with mainstream approaches to understanding the concept of “privilege” in conjunction with women, this thought is otherwise correct. But we’re not approaching the topic that way. Rather, I’m responding to a very specific objection: that the radical feminist undermines the autonomy of the sex worker by taking options away from her. The radical feminist can respond that all women will have to take on costs to escape sex oppression; this undermining of the sex worker’s autonomy by narrowing her options is the cost that she is asked to take on.
The advantage of this response is that it acknowledges that there is a cost, but simply responds that it’s not an unreasonable or disproportionate cost. It would be great if we could change the world by reducing the options only of those with the most numerous and high‑quality options, as might be the case when we argue for income equality by way of higher taxes to the top income brackets. Unfortunately, that’s not how the world works. We cannot get rid of markets in organs or markets in pregnancy without also reducing the options of some of those with the fewest and lowest‑quality option sets.
However noble her intentions, the feminist who insists upon the autonomy rights of the individual woman not to contribute to the project of women’s liberation—rather than insisting on the interests of the class in escaping their current conditions—may be functioning as a propagandist for the status quo.
Reproduced from Is It Wrong to Buy Sex? A Debate, 1st Edition by Holly Lawford-Smith and Angie Pepper, published by Routledge. © Holly Lawford-Smith and Angie Pepper, 2024. Reproduced by arrangement with Taylor & Francis Group.
