Belgium is working towards new laws regarding sex work, making the workers eligeble for pensions, healthcare plans, contracts and overall more legal status. This was done in corporation with sex workers, orgs surrounding sex work and my place of work, the Union.
Now, I worked with former sex workers and human trafficking victims myself and I am aware of their struggles. I am not going to outright deny their right to fight for improvement.
What bugs me is the normalization of an industry that is heavily, and I mean very heavily, infested with human rights abuses. For every one empowered sexworker there are a thousand human trafficking victims. Giving them a pension is not helping in the slightest.
And then there is the whole thing of tying things like unemployment benefits to you wanting to look for work. Here in Belgium your benefits can be cut as soon as you refuse a job that is offered to you through government instances. What if we further legitimize sex work and you refuse a sex worker position? There have been caes already of the instances offering unemployed actresses porn jobs, so why not offer them sex workers contracts? And why not cut their benefits of they refuse a fitting job? Right?
And everyone is so happy about it. As if the whole industry is one collective of happy people doing a fun job instead of the horror it is.
Sorry for ranting but fuck me what a mess
Oh and then there also is the whole thing of the government interfering if sex is refused more than 10 times a year. A pomp could literally call the government inspection on you for refusing to be raped.
What? How is that justified? What is the rationalization? Why do they have pimps at all if it’s regulated?
Misogyny and patriarchy are so normalized and interwoven with our lives that we’re expected to take minor improvements on an abomination as progress. I feel your pain comrade.
It’s like a slave strike that results in a law for better accommodations and maximum amount of corporal violence that can be used. It’d obviously be an improvement in a vacuum but it’s just making something that shouldn’t exist slightly more comfortable while lessening the ammo those against it have. The solution of course is abolition so anything that perpetuates it, normalizes it, gives it good PR, allows people to live in denial about it or act like it’s okay is frustrating and I must say confusing.
This is just the limits of working with reformism and within capitalism I feel. It does make one want to condemn and step away from the whole thing in disgust as a farce.
And I’ve expressed before these same fears. It’s logical and will happen which is why I’m against normalization. I’m not for criminalizing victims but not for legalizing it either for these reasons.
Thanks you said it much better than I did!
sounds like they are trying to fight the negative aspects of it, as long as sex workers themselves have a leading potion in stuff like this i think it cant be negative. human trafficking and abuses within the industry is only able to be so prevalent because it exists in the shadows and in a grey zone if not outright the black market. whatever u think of sex work and its place in future societies and its validity as work, sex workers are workers and they are some of the most oppressed and badly treated workers im glad for anything that improves their position.
Completely agree. I haven’t worked up the courage, but it’s something I absolutely would like to do as a part time job. It’s a service like any other, and it should be treated as such.
Edit: to the downvoters, why? My body your choice?
Other users have summed it up: you are legitimizing sex work as a “real job” instead of the horror that it is.
Sex work has long-term consequences. Mia Khalifa was admonished by her family and people back in Lebanon after the video became viral.
I know
Isn’t that more of a mark against her family for being shitty to her?
It’s all fine ideas when you are an outsider looking in, but to me at least, it sounds like it just gives the illegal part of the sex industry more insentive to traffick human beings instead of hiring a legitimately consensual sex worker.
legitimately consensual sex worker
no such thing, really. Not a lotta rich kids signing up to be sex workers.
But once they do, they get a Netflix TV show (“Baby”, 2018).
That’s not exactly as profound as you think it is. Plenty of people enjoy their job or aspects of it, but hate the commodification of their labor.
I think what you’re saying is somewhat chauvinist, even if you do have a point. Sex workers themselves aren’t a monolith, and I think marxist sex workers deserve a bigger voice.
Here in Belgium your benefits can be cut as soon as you refuse a job that is offered to you through government instances…What if…you refuse a sex worker position?
well, that sounds kinda grim, it will need some education to convince people that prostitution is in most cases degrading for the person who do it. i mean, there will be people who likes it, but most women wouldn’t be as enthusiastic to suck strangers as a line of work
I’m a bit confused by this post. I thought the only viable strategy for now is harm reduction since abolition simply doesn’t and never will work and leads to far worse outcomes. So until we live in a post-scarcity society, you have to support harm reduction.
The goal should be to make pimps superfluous and be able to root out sex slavery. But not normalize prostitution. It will always have a stigma.
benefits can be cut as soon as you refuse a job
…
you refuse a sex worker position?
Imo this would be a very clear cut case of human trafficking, carried out by the state. Meaning if cases like this happens, which is inevitable, no justice would ever be given, and it wouldn’t even be recognized as human trafficking.
What your union HAS to do is, lobby for a law, that exempts every kind of sex working jobs from this fucked up rule.
As for if the rules improve the material conditions of sex workers… idfk I am no sex worker, but the sex workers and orgs surrounding that field will know. HOWEVER your concern is incredibly valid. The sex work industry shouldn’t be legitimized. That is one of the worst thing white feminism has done imo. So it is important to also lobby for laws like… making it illegal to make advertisement for sex work. Though this might criminalize the workers in some case, which is the thing they always tell us not to do.
Also destroying sex work lobby is also very important, because the lobby will only be beneficial for the most disgusting capitalists.
There was a post on reddit a few years ago, a British female redditor was unemployed and on benefits. The jobcentre showed her a job advert for a position in a strip club and told her to apply for it. When she refused, they stopped her payments. So it is already happening and it’s terrifying.
If the people themselves are happy, maybe they know something you don’t. Have you asked them? What did they say?
This seems like you’re taking a fringe interpretation of possible future and panicking about it. For example, why did you mix sex worker together with adult acting? Yeah, they could be related, but it doesn’t necessarily follow. That was weird. If we get to mix careers willy nilly, that can be done for any two jobs. So maybe you should be worried about unemployment law itself, not sex workers.