The lovemaking work debate

Posted on 5th January two thousand ten by ISJ

The debate on “lovemaking work” has divided the trade union movement. While the GMB has attempted to organise women who work in lap dancing clubs, in two thousand nine the Trade Union Congress (TUC) Women’s Congress voted against a movement which supported the decriminalisation of the lovemaking industry and the unionisation of hook-up workers. Instead a movement was passed in favour of the criminalisation of the purchase of hook-up. Over the last two years the University and College Union (UCU), the Communication Workers Union (CWU) and Unison have taken different positions on this debate. Within feminist thinking there are opposed views on hookup work and violence against women. Radical feminists in alliance with neoconservatives campaign for the abolition of prostitution and, in the interim, are supporting legislation that proposes the criminalisation of boys. Other feminists, many of them academics who research in this area, as well as hook-up workers’ organisations themselves, request the decriminalisation of prostitution. They argue that, while the long-term aim is to eliminate the conditions that breed prostitution, in the brief term the priority is to keep women safe.

The language itself is very problematic and emotive. The use of the term “hooker” is regarded as a denigrating word used for women who are compelled into selling hook-up through poverty and exclusion, while the use of the term “hook-up worker” is seen as dignifying an activity which reflects and compounds women’s oppression. This article does not suggest that lovemaking work is “a job like any other”—however, the term lovemaking work will be used, very first because it avoids the moral condemnation often fastened to the word hooker. 2nd, this term is used because women who directly sell hook-up on the streets, in flats or in brothels are only a subset of a much larger number of women who work in the lovemaking industry. One The modern hook-up industry is a multibillion dollar industry, which generates fat profits for both transnational corporations and criminal gangs. The hookup industry is difficult to define because it encompasses a phat range of diverse activities. According to the writer Elisabeth Bernstein:

The scope of sexual commerce has grown to encompass: live lovemaking shows; all multiplicity of pornographic texts, movies, and photos, both in print and on line; fetish clubs; sexual “emporiums” featuring lap-dancing and wall-dancing; escort agencies; telephone hookup and cyber-sex contacts; “drive through” striptease venues; and organised hookup tours of developing countries. Two

Accurate figures are hard to come by, but there is a general consensus that the last two decades have seen a resurgence in the international hookup industry, including street prostitution, the voluntary or compelled migration of women to work in the lovemaking industry and the proliferation of lap dancing clubs. What is certain is that the lovemaking industry is hugely profitable. A European Parliament report from two thousand four estimated the global hookup industry to be worth $Five,000 billion to $7,000 billion. Three Some of the transnational corporations involved, such as Hugh Heffner’s Playboy and lap dancing chains wielded by Spearmint Rhino and Foxy Lady, are well known. However, many evidently more respectable companies make phat profits from providing telephone lines and cable and satellite programmes, and being the internet providers for the hookup industry. These include GM Motors (through DirecTV), Time Warner, News International (EchoStar satellite, AT&T) and hotel chain Marriot International.

In a world where everything is for sale, activities such as lap dancing, which were once viewed as oppressive to women, are now accepted as mainstream leisure opportunities. Pole dancing lessons, which require stilettos and skimpy cut-offs, are widely advertised as the fresh way of keeping fit. Soft porn is routinely displayed at the counters of supermarkets and garages, and prostitution is glamorised on TV in programmes such as The Secret Diaries of a Call Lady. At the same time there was widespread revulsion at the murder of five youthfull women working on the streets of Ipswich in 2007. This

combination of enlargened visibility, normalisation and brutal violence has revitalised a debate about how to react to prostitution and the hookup industry, about whether lovemaking workers are criminals or victims, and whether the industry should be tolerated, reformed to improve women’s lives or totally opposed as the institutionalised oppression of women. Two of the main debates have coalesced, very first around whether working in the lovemaking industry is fundamentally the same as working in other industries with the consequence that “lovemaking workers” should organise in unions just like other workers, and 2nd, whether clients should be criminalised as a way of reducing the request for paid hookup. These debates are the concentrate of this article.

It is argued here that understanding prostitution and the broader lovemaking industry has to be rooted in understanding the specific oppression of women within the capitalist family unit and the enlargening commodification of hookup as the marketplace intrudes into the most intimate aspects of human existence. In the broader sense these phenomena have to be located in the context of the dynamics of capitalist expansion, in the vast growth in the global reach of capitalism in the late 19th century and again over the last thirty years in what is loosely termed globalisation. In these two periods the factors which drive women (and much smaller numbers of dudes) to sell lovemaking have been transformed.

The hook-up as work debate

The notion of “hookup work”, that selling hook-up is a job like any other, emerged in the 1970s through prostitution advocacy groups in the US such as Cast Off Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE). It is predicated on the idea that, as all hook-up is commodified under capitalism, what can broadly be termed erotic labour is another service that can be bought or sold like any other. The result of this analysis is to argue against the criminalisation of prostitution and against attempts to eradicate prostitution altogether. Some contemporary campaigners go beyond arguing that “hookup work” is a job like any other and argue that “hook-up work” is actually superior to other jobs that are available for women. They point to benefits in terms of working hours, autonomy, self-direction and even job satisfaction.

Some feast “hookup work” as an inherent human right and, in particular, as a women’s right of sexual expression and an arena in which women can exercise disproportionate control over boys. At this end of the spectrum of theories about “lovemaking work”, what began as an understanding of how economic necessity drives women into the lovemaking industry has become a celebration and expression of women’s empowerment. For example, Ana Lopez of the GMB union and the International Union of Lovemaking Workers (IUSW), calls prostitution a “positive choice” for women. The IUSW website argues that prostitution can be empowering for women:

People build up private strength from selling their figures because their clients adore and admire them, they have as much hookup as they want and defy traditional mores and roles imposed on them. Often hookers are utterly healthy, playful, creative, adventurous and independent women. Four

Such arguments are accepted by academic Gregor Gall who claims of the “lovemaking work” discourse:

[It] has been shown to be adequately sturdy to permit the generation of lovemaking, sexual services and sexual artefacts as commodities under capitalism to be categorised not just as work but as wage labour…[therefore] hook-up wage labour under capitalism may be expected to be subject to the same broad impulses and dynamics of the process of capitalist accumulation that other wage labour is subject [to]. Five

Gall concludes that as “hook-up work” is fundamentally the same as other forms of employment, it generates the potential for a unionisation project and the possibility of hook-up workers exercising collective influence in order to defend and advance their interests.

At the other end of the spectrum there is abolition feminism which alleges that all commercial hook-up is violence against women. Proposals to improve safety for hookup workers by legitimising their working situations are rejected as legitimising violence against women. In this view there is no qualitative difference inbetween the “violence” of a society which “coerces” a woman to become a lap dancer, and violence that voices itself in strikings, rape and murder.

Inbetween these polar completes of the spectrum socialists and feminists take a range of views. However, in order to consider these arguments it is significant to understand the relationship inbetween capitalism, prostitution and the hookup industry and the specific oppression of women in capitalist society.

Capitalism, prostitution and the hook-up industry

Albeit it has been dubbed the oldest profession, prostitution has not been found in all societies. Historian N J Ringdal suggests that prostitution was a unique cultural phenomenon very first developed in Mesopotamia and later spread to surrounding cultures in Egypt, Greece and India. Six However, from ancient times, many societies in North America, the old East India and Polynesia had a high degree of freedom for women and were unacquainted with prostitution. Seven Therefore prostitution was not an unavoidable feature of early human societies. Leading Bolshevik Party member Alexandra Kollontai helped to develop a Marxist analysis of prostitution after the Russian Revolution of 1917. She drew a distinction inbetween prostitution in other eras, such as ancient Greece and Rome, and prostitution under capitalism. Eight In ancient times the number of hookers was puny and prostitution was seen as a legal complement to special family relationships. In the Middle Ages, under artisan production, prostitution was accepted as lawful and unproblematic. Hookers had their own guilds and took part in festivals and local events just like any other guilds. Nine

With the rise of capitalism that switched. Prostitution in the 19th century occurred on a much greater scale than in previous societies. It was fed by the massive social dislocation as people were driven from agriculture into the manufacturing system. The urbanisation, poverty and large scale migration which characterised 19th century capitalism produced conditions in which brothels sprang up around the globe. In his book London Labour and the London Poor, written in the 1850s, Henry Mayhew described how women in seasonal and insecure trades were frequently driven into prostitution at certain times of the year. Ten Thus milliners, whose abilities were only in request during the London society “season”, became particularly associated with prostitution. Socialist anarchist Emma Goldman quoted a explore called Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century to describe the conditions that fuelled the growth of prostitution:

Albeit prostitution has existed in all ages, it was left to the 19th century to develop it into a gigantic social institution. The development of industry with vast masses of people in the competitive market, the growth and congestion of large cities, the insecurity and uncertainty of employment, has given prostitution an impetus never dreamed of at any period in human history. Eleven

In one thousand nine hundred twenty one Kollontai claimed that in Berlin there was one hooker for every twenty “fair” women. In Paris the ratio was one to eighteen and in London one to nine. Twelve

Then as now there was a strong relationship inbetween the migration of women and prostitution. At the end of the 19th century around eighty percent of hookers in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires were very first generation immigrants from Europe. Thirteen This was true of major cities from Italy to India, with the majority of migrants being from Central and Eastern Europe. Fourteen Hysteria and moral funk focused on the growth of a “white victim trade”. The claim that white women were being defiled by foreign and non-white guys brought forward an alliance of reactionaries encompassing the church and politicians. However, there was little evidence that women had been kidnapped or coerced. Rather they were attempting to escape from desperate poverty and to some extent build up economic independence.

International capitalist development in the 19th century transformed prostitution into an international hook-up industry. The most latest period of globalisation and restructuring of capitalist production, from the 1970s onwards, has again reshaped the hook-up industry as it has wreaked havoc with the lives of ordinary people, women in particular. In developing countries structural adjustment programmes imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have enlargened displacement in rural areas, enhanced unemployment in urban areas and led to wage cuts and increases in poverty. In fresh production zones of South East Asia transnational corporations rail roughshod over minimum wage and health and safety laws, leaving women working in hazardous conditions. The flourishing hookup industry fills the gap left by wages paid below subsistence levels or the lack of any secure, paid employment.

Neoliberal policies have produced a ample polarisation inbetween super rich elites and the marginalised and despairingly poor who are often driven into the informal economy and hook-up industry to make finishes meet. For example, Russia today is a major source of migrant hookup workers and a major destination for hook-up workers. One writer has described the “erotisation of Russian culture”, in the post-Soviet era. The fresh Russian super-rich have fuelled a commercial hook-up boom in which “prostitution was fully incorporated into both the public and private life of the post-Soviet elites, who were often to be found in expensive night clubs surrounded by call women”. Fifteen This has coincided with the dramatic collapse of the economy and the drying up of any alternative sources of employment. A survey in the 1990s ranked prostitution eight out of the twenty most common jobs in the country. Sixteen

The Iraq War, which has brought in its wake the destruction of the Iraqi economy and social structures, has enhanced the hook-up industry. The Independent newspaper reported that an estimated 50,000 Iraqi women refugees were being driven into prostitution in Syria. Nihal Hassan reported from a lovemaking club in Damascus, “The make up can’t disguise the fact that most are in their mid-teens. It’s a strange look in a conservative Muslim country, but this is the hookup business, and it’s flourishing as a result of the war in Iraq”. Seventeen The hook-up industry lies at the heart of sophisticated international networks of poverty, legal persecution and economic exploitation which force women into prostitution. However, these networks could not have developed in this way were it not for the continuing oppression of women in contemporary society.

The expansion of international capitalism at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries had many similarities to the current period of capitalism in terms of the internationalisation of finance, trade and investment and the hook-up industry. However, one significant distinction must be made. There was a virtual absence of immigration limitations up until the end of the Very first World War, while since the 2nd World War increasingly repressive and pervasive immigration legislation has been introduced in the developed world. Anti-immigration legislation means there is no possibility for poor and unskilled women to travel independently and work legally, so they become dependent on recruiting agencies and criminal networks. While some find low paid jobs looking after other people’s families, or cleaning and catering, others get enmeshed in the sophisticated web of the hookup industry.

Migrant women working in the hook-up industry are at risk from deportation, imprisonment, harassment and manhandle. Deportation means they end up with disastrous debts that they will never be able to pay and often face rejection by their families. In the UK government agencies consider trafficked women above all else as undesirable aliens. The fact that they may be victims of sexual violence and exploitation is downright subordinate or even irrelevant to their immigration status. Refugee organisations have accused the Home Office of choosing them as soft targets to boost deportation targets because migrant lovemaking workers are an effortless catch. Therefore albeit Fresh Labour politicians pay lip service to the plight of trafficked women, it is their government’s repressive immigration legislation that leaves women vulnerable to criminal gangs and treats the victims of hook-up traffickers at illegal immigrants to be deported against their will.

The roots of oppression and the commodification of lovemaking

The scale and nature of prostitution and hookup work have been and are conditioned by the poverty, polarisation and dislocation endemic to global capitalism. However, prostitution is not just another dimension of exploitation, but has to be understood in the context of women’s oppression. Women have not always been oppressed. According to Frederick Engels women’s oppression developed with the emergence of private property and was later transformed by the rise of the bourgeois family, which became the mechanism for transferring property from one generation to the next. Eighteen Modern women’s oppression was also shaped by the separation of the home from the workplace during the industrial revolution and the resulting creation of a separate sphere of private life.

Along with Engels, Bebel argued that prostitution was the spin side of marriage and a “necessary social institution of bourgeois society”. Nineteen Prostitution played a specific role because sexual interest was liquidated from the bourgeois family and assigned to hookers. Women within the family were expected to suffer hook-up as a means of procreating, whereas dudes were deemed to have desires that could only be satiated outside the restrains of the family. Some Victorian moralists justified the existence of prostitution on this basis. As historian Leonore Davidoff has written:

Defenders of prostitution spotted it as a necessary institution which acted as a giant sewer, drawing away the distasteful, but inescapable waste products of masculine lustfulness, leaving the middle class household and middle class ladies unspoiled and unsullied. Twenty

Alexandra Kollontai wrote that prostitution was “the unavoidable shadow of the official institution of marriage designed to preserve the rights of private property and to ensure property inheritance through a line of lawful heirs”. Twenty one This attitude helps to explain why prostitution was morally condemned but tolerated and in some countries, such as France, very regulated by the state.

Marxist accounts of the roots of women’s oppression were revived by some strands in the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In its early days the women’s movement sought to challenge the economic exploitation of women with campaigns against discrimination and for equal pay in the workplace. The movement also campaigned for 24-hour childcare, equal access to education and jobs and the extension of women’s control over their own fertility through access to contraception and abortion. Women challenged stereotypes about their appearance and the dual standards applied to their sexiness, which sanctioned studs’s sexual activity while castigating women who exercised the same freedom.

However, the gains made by the women’s movement were not sustained. One wing of the movement retreated into the politics of the private and substituted individual lifestyles for collective fight while the other, the socialist-feminists, harnessed themselves to the Labour Party. The result of this was to gravely weaken the movement’s capability to challenge inequality in the workplace and women’s oppression in general. The demise of the women’s movement, coupled with the enlargened marketisation of hook-up, laid the way open for a resurgence in fresh forms of sexism, the so-called ironic sexism which has led to the normalisation of “youngsters’ mags”, pornography and lap dancing clubs.

Today women participate more widely in the workforce than ever before, and albeit some gains have been made, genuine equality is a long way off. Albeit the ideology of the nuclear family is stronger than the reality, the family remains central to capitalism in terms of reproducing labour and fulfilling welfare functions. The oppression of women and the continued existence of the family are generated by the interests of capitalism which is best served by pushing the cargo of social welfare onto individual families. Women are left to cope with a post-feminist ideology that tells them that they are equal and liberated, whereas the reality is one of unequal pay, responsibility for childcare and sexist discrimination.

Capitalism in the 21st century has enhanced the objectification of women and the commodification of lovemaking. Hookup is used everywhere, to sell everything. The social relationships that create the possibility of an industry for lovemaking are deeply rooted in the structures of capitalism itself. The dominance of market competition over individual relationships creates a situation where human desires are transformed into commodities which can be sold for a profit. In his early writings Marx described how, in capitalist society:

Each attempt to establish over the other an alien power, in the hope of thereby achieving satisfaction of his own selfish needs…becomes the inventive and ever calculating victim of inhuman, refined, unnatural and imaginary appetites. He places himself at the disposition of his neighbour’s most depraved fancies, panders to his needs, excites unhealthy appetites in him, and pounces on every weakness, so that he can then request the money for his labour of love. Twenty two

Today we have become so used to a situation where all our human needs have been transformed into commodities that it seems almost natural. In their rapacious search for fresh markets to exploit, capitalist organisations probe more and more deeply into all aspects of our lives and in the process convert them further. Thus money can buy anything, including the simulation of love, but on the other side of the coin, all our human desires and abilities contract into a concentrate on consuming or what Marx called a sense of having:

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when we directly wield, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc, in brief, when we use it. Twenty three

Our capability to practice sexual pleasure is alienated from us and turned into a commodity which we then desire to consume. But this process converts sexual confidence and satisfaction into goals which recede further and further from our reach. In her book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and The Rise of Raunch Culture, Ariel Levy shows how the growing commodification of lovemaking and objectification of women’s bods has become increasingly divorced and disconnected from sexual pleasure and fulfilment. Twenty four

The hookup industry now shows up to be setting the agenda for numerous TV programmes, which display how women are encouraged to seek private happiness by being surgically, cosmetically and sartorially tweaked into conforming to certain sexual stereotypes. In the US breast augmentation rose by seven hundred percent inbetween one thousand nine hundred ninety two and 2004. In some South American countries this procedure is a standard bounty for a daughter at Legitimate. Twenty five Increasingly, women are even ready to fall under a “vaginoplasty” in which their vulva and labia are surgically altered to make them look like those of porn starlets in Playboy. There could be no more graphic example of how women in particular are alienated from their figures to such an extent that they are ready to pay for someone to cut and stitch them into a form they are told will make them desirable to others.

Hook-up is not immune from the conditions which form all aspects of our lives. All sexiness is shaped by the material conditions and social priorities of the society we live in, but the open treatment of hook-up as a commodity to be sold on the market is not just another aspect of that process. Sexiness is regarded as one of the last intimate aspects of ourselves. Hook-up is a part of our human nature, an practice that can be fulfilling and a central part of an individual’s identity. As one economist put it:

Prostitution is the classic example of how commodification debases a bounty’s value and its giver, as it demolishes the kind of reciprocity required to realise human sexiness as a collective good and the mutual recognition of each playmate’s needs. Twenty six

Openness about lovemaking and expectations of sexual fulfilment were key requests of the women’s liberation movement. However, the sexual freedom fought for in the 1960s and 1970s has been contorted and repackaged as commodities. The selling of sexiness to clients converts the figure into an object, a thing for someone else to use. All aspirations to autonomy and private satisfaction are aggressively stripped away by commercial hookup which degrades both women and fellows and reinforces the most backward prejudices against women.

Organising lovemaking workers

After the Russian Revolution of one thousand nine hundred seventeen the Bolsheviks believed that prostitution was incompatible with the aspiration for sexual equality. They revoked all laws concerning prostitution and the very first All Russian Congress of Peasants and Working Women adopted the slogan “A woman of the Soviet Labour Republic is a free citizen with equal rights, and cannot be and must not be the object of buying and selling.” Despite these proclamations prostitution in Russia grew after 1917, mainly due to the harsh economic circumstances that prevailed. It was dealt with inconsistently with brothels operating openly in some areas, while in others hookers were arrested.

Kollontai’s view was that prostitution was wrong, not on moral grounds, but because it stopped women contributing to the socialist society. Further, she argued that prostitution represented a threat to the fresh socialist morality because it ruined solidarity and comradeship in the working class. Therefore the fight against prostitution took place on two fronts: the very first to secure economic equality for women and their participation in the labour force, the 2nd to undermine the existence of the family as the source of women’s oppression by introducing collective canteens, laundries and nurseries. Twenty seven

There was also a upbeat exchange on the issue of prostitution and sexiness inbetween German socialist and campaigner for women’s rights Clara Zetkin and Lenin. Lenin recognised that hookers were dual victims of bourgeois society—”victims, very first of its accursed system of property and secondly of its accursed moral hypocrisy”. However, he condemned the efforts by a Communist woman in Hamburg to organise hookers as a “morbid deviation”. He argued that socialists should concentrate on organising women where they had collective power, in the workplaces, and thus convert the entire of society. Zetkin was herself contemptuous of the “empty chatter of bourgeois women” who moralised about the evils of prostitution—she argued that without well paid work for women, any discussion of abolishing prostitution was nonsense. Twenty eight

Some campaigners and academics argue that prostitution is a job like any other in that lovemaking workers negotiate rates of pay for the service they perform, and have control over their working conditions and exercise more autonomy than women in many other low-paid, low-status jobs. However, the possibility of collective organisation at work rests on the sharing of conditions, a common employer, and collective grievances, which can be opposed.

Lovemaking workers face massive barriers in their capacity to organise collectively to improve pay and conditions. Women involved in street prostitution are marginalised, isolated and desperate, where there is little possibility of fighting for collective rates for the job, of negotiating collectively with clients or contributing to pension schemes. In the UK women who work on the streets are mostly those excluded from society, such as runaway teenagers, drug maniacs and undocumented migrants turning to prostitution as a means of survival. It is by no means clear that they would wish to be incorporated into civil society as a “hookup worker”, even if this option was open to them. Not everyone who sells hookup thinks of themselves as a “hook-up worker” or wishes to be recognised as such. Twenty nine

While this may be the case for women working on the streets of the UK historically, in parts of the developed world the situation may be more elaborate. During the 19th century and very first part of the 20th century there were many examples of hookers organising and protesting against maltreatment. The current Uruguayan lovemaking workers’ organisation has the seeds of its history in the fight of Grind hookers during the 19th century. Everyday resistance is documented from the mid-19th century in Lucknow (India), and Guatamala, and in colonial Kenya in the 1920s and 1930s. Thirty There were significant swings of hook-up workers’ organising in the 1970s and then in the early 1990s in response to HIV/AIDs. A third wave of organising shows up to be emerging significantly in India and Argentina. The Karnataka Hookup Workers Union, established in India in 2006, has specifically constituted itself as a trade union, affiliating to the Fresh Trade Union Initiative (NTUI) which has organised other informal workers. They have assisted in enrolling women in the electoral register, struggled against the criminalisation of clients and lobbied the government about violence against hook-up workers. Thirty one

In two thousand one in Argentina the Asociación de Mujeres Meretrices de la Argentina (AMMAR) lovemaking workers’ organisation became an official affiliate member of the Central de los Trabajadores de la Argentina trade union federation (CTA). Albeit subject to debate in the movement, their membership went beyond a token gesture. The CTA used resources to support women against manhandle, while AMMAR branch secretaries took on responsibilities as elected members of the CTA. Thirty two There was no suggestion that hook-up work was desirable or fulfilling, but as (often) single parents it was the best option available to feed themselves and their families. In the words of one of the members of AMMAR their aspiration was:

That one day there are no more women that exercise this work for necessity, however, as we are not the owners of the truth we leave open the discussion as to whether—in the future we fantasy of—there will be women that all the same want to do this work. Thirty three

The rise of lap dancing clubs

The hook-up industry extends beyond the direct exchange of money for lovemaking. Lap dancing clubs are a concrete manifestation of the lovemaking industry which socialists need to address. Very first, these have been the very places in which there is deemed to be “erotic” labour and which have been targeted for union recruitment by the GMB trade union. 2nd, as socialists or activists in our communities, we have to take a view as to whether it is acceptable that these are located in our areas.

Lap dancing clubs are an significant aspect of the industry because they are introduced as its respectable face. Clubs like Spearmint Rhino have managed to build up an air of respectability, thanks to slick marketing and celebrity endorsements. Whereas undress clubs and brothels are seen as sordid and distasteful, lap dancing clubs are seen as an essential part of “lad” culture—somewhere that “city boys” can spend their bloated bonuses. Even worse is that taking staff to a club, buying drinks and paying for women to dance are legitimate business expenses and companies can claim back fifteen percent VAT. Thirty four This reflects the entrenched discrimination and sexism in the financial sector. In this “ironic” and post-feminist culture attendance is not special to studs. Women are dismissed as puritans and spoilsports if they do not join in.

Lap dancing has been described as “the fastest growing area in Britain’s hook-up industry”. There are one hundred fifty clubs in the UK and twenty in London and they are estimated to generate £1 billion per year. Thirty five One factor in the proliferation of these clubs is the two thousand three Licensing Act, which introduced the one size fits all premises licence, meaning that de-robe clubs are no longer required to get special permission for bareness. Some have suggested that lap dancing is totally separate from the lovemaking industry and is simply one among many leisure activities open to ordinary people. The previous holder of For Your Eyes Only, Alan Whitehead, dismissed criticisms of his contribution to the hookup industry and argued, “Sure they take their clothes off, but they’re not strippers. They’re dancers”. Thirty six

Lap dancing is promoted as a job where women can make lots of money and have some power and autonomy. For the vast majority of women this is sheer nonsense. All lap dancers in clubs are self-employed, relying on tips and income from private dances. Dancers pay inbetween £35 and £100 per night to the club management to “rent” facilities such as poles, cabaret areas, private dance booths and VIP suites. This self-employment is not liberatory but keeps women permanently insecure and subservient. The women are not in control, autonomous or empowered—they are rigorously monitored and managed.

Switches in the law reclassifying lap dancing clubs as “hook-up encounter institutions” should be welcomed, albeit cautiously. Radical feminists such as Julie Bindel have been ready to make alliances with right wing groups to call on the state to get lap dancing clubs banned. Socialists should have no truck lining up with such people. Beyond opposing moralistic arguments we do not see the solution as providing more power to the state, as the state is a means of oppression, not liberation. For example, in 1984, the Obscene Publications Act (1959) was used to raid the Gay’s the Word bookshop and seize hundreds of books as part of the moral backlash under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government.

The influence of lap dancing clubs on localities goes far beyond what actually takes place inwards them. It means that women who live and work in these areas are more likely to be subject to manhandle and harassment. In two thousand six the Respect group in Tower Hamlets council argued against the extension of licences for lap dancing clubs on the grounds that they degraded and exploited women and were part of Fresh Labour’s idea of regenerating internal cities by repackaging them as playgrounds for the rich. The City of London Corporation does not permit hook-up clubs or lap dancing venues. Instead taxi geysers of stockbrokers from the City head to disadvantaged areas on the edge of the City, like Tower Hamlets.

Lap dancing clubs are symptomatic of the broader way in which the hook-up industry has been normalised and come to be viewed as acceptable. Before two thousand three Jobcentre Plus (the UK government employment agency) did not advertise vacancies from within the “adult entertainment” industry. It would have meant that people not considering this type of employment could have risked their benefit entitlements. After a legal challenge from Ann Summers Ltd in two thousand three this decision was reversed. Inbetween two thousand six and 2007, three hundred fifty one jobs were advertised in government job centres, including pole dancers, “adult” talk line workers, masseuses and escorts. Thirty seven

Some campaigners for rights for hook-up workers argue that erotic dancing is adult entertainment, not a sexual service, and that this group of workers should have access to the same employment rights and protection as other workers in the economy. In two thousand one “erotic dancers” and others working in the hookup industry were invited to join the GMB. The GMB has adopted the International Union Hook-up of Workers (IUSW) definition, which encompasses “any workers who use their figure and/or their sexiness to earn a living”. In two thousand four it had a branch of one hundred fifty members, mainly lap and table dancers. The unions signed a recognition agreement with two lap dancing clubs and maintain that working conditions and terms of employment have since improved. Codes of conduct and grievance procedures have been introduced, and union representatives been elected in those two clubs. However well intentioned the GMB, it is not clear that such organising has gone beyond a token presence in the industry. If the women who work in these places are able to organise to improve their wages and working conditions, then of course socialists must support them. Our quarrel is not with the women who work in them, but with the big firms and individuals who make vast sums for commodifying lovemaking and trading on the objectification of women.

Socialists should oppose lap dancing clubs because they are an integral part of the lovemaking industry. Their very existence helps to perpetuate the oppression of women. Lap dancing clubs are not normal workplaces, and attempts to characterise them as such must be resisted. Whether the dancers have union rights or not, the clubs function on the basis of the objectification of women and package them as objects available for the sexual gratification of others. The existence of lap dancing clubs makes it tighter to fight against the idea that women should be valued according to how well they conform to physical stereotypes or how sexually available they are.

Criminalising guys?

Rather than criminalising hook-up workers themselves, some governments have sought to criminalise the boys who solicit or pay for sexual services. One of the contentious clauses of the UK’s Police and Crime Bill (2009) has been the proposal to criminalise dudes who buy hookup. The argument is that shifting the cargo of blame to clients will bring about a reduction in prostitution. This has been strongly opposed by a broad range of organisations and representatives of hook-up workers as making things more dangerous as it drives activity underground where women are less protected. Thirty eight

In Sweden a one thousand nine hundred ninety eight law criminalised the buying of hook-up, a strategy which embodied elements of a feminist treatment that sees prostitution as a disturbance of women akin to rape. Street prostitution in Sweden has fallen, but prostitution via the internet has risen, which some suggest could have happened independently of the legislation. Furthermore, hook-up worker organisations have pointed out that the criminalisation of their clients only shoves them into darker, less frequented areas, making them more vulnerable. Women who work on the streets are the most marginalised of all hook-up workers and they suffer the most from such legislation. O’Connell Davidson suggests that calling on the state to penalise buyers of lovemaking has encouraged some feminists to forge alliances with repressive coerces of the state and reactionary coerces. She argues that this has involved:

Police chiefs calling for more extensive police powers and tougher sentencing policy, anti-immigration politicians calling for tighter border controls, and moral conservatives urging a come back to “family values”. Thirty nine

It is very difficult to identify the factors which propel fellows into paying for lovemaking: their motives are diverse and there are many obstacles to any open discussion of the subject. The “punter” of popular myth is the sad, inadequate figure who cannot relate to women. However, Paying the Price, a two thousand four government consultation paper, found that the typical customer was “a man of around thirty years of age, married, in full-time employment, and with no criminal convictions”. Forty Today the number of boys visiting hookers, or admitting to it, is enlargening. The Independent quotes a two thousand five investigate published in the British Medical Journal which found that the proportion of British guys paying for lovemaking had gone up from Five.6 percent in one thousand nine hundred ninety to almost 8.8 percent in 2000. Dr Helen Ward, lead author of the report, points to growing divorce rates, lovemaking tourism like stag holidays and the enhancing availability of commercial hook-up through such means as the internet as reasons for the growth in masculine participation:

It’s far more acceptable to visit a hooker. The hook-up industry is far more visible. Anyone with a WAP phone or a computer can find hookup to buy. It’s part of the commercialisation of everything—these days we expect to buy anything we want when we want it. Forty one

Boys may turn to buying hook-up because they work long hours, are isolated from social networks or are part of a transient population. But they are also encouraged to think that they should be having lovemaking and that women’s bods are just another commodity that can be bought, like a car or a plasma TV. There is nothing unpreventable about this situation. As Julia O’Connell Davidson has argued:

Human beings are not born wishing to buy commercial hook-up services or visit lap dancing clubs, any more than they are born with specific desires to play the lottery or drink Coca-Cola. They have to learn to imagine that it would be pleasurable to pay a stranger to dance naked for them; they have to be trained that consuming such services is a signifier of the fact that they are having joy, a marker of their social identity and status as “a real man”, “adult”, “not gay” or whatever. Forty two

It is capitalist society, with its sexist social structures and rampant consumerism, that is the educator.

State accommodation or repression

State responses to the lovemaking industry have historically combined the repression of hookers with a tacit acknowledgement that prostitution cannot be eradicated and so must be regulated. One of the most legendary examples of the former came in one thousand eight hundred sixty four when the British government passed the very first of three Contagious Diseases Acts which applied to eleven garrison and port towns. The acts were a response to soaring levels of venereal disease in the armed compels which were so crucial to the British Empire. The acts permitted police officers to arrest women they thought might be hookers and force them to suffer a abjecting and painful internal examination for signs of venereal disease. Women with such diseases could be held in a “lock hospital” for up to three months. All working class women in the designated towns were vulnerable to manhandle and arrest. A national campaign coerced the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, but the attitudes they embodied were enshrined in further legislation which followed.

Today most state responses are framed by two opposing political perspectives. The very first sees prostitution as morally reprehensible and an affront to moral decency, which must be eradicated, and the 2nd sees hook-up as a commodity like any other and seeks to regulate the lovemaking industry. Neither works to reduce the exploitation involved in the hookup industry.

Some campaigners, such as the English Collective of Hookers, point to Fresh Zealand’s decriminalisation of prostitution in two thousand three as the model to be emulated. Campaigners point to how decriminalisation benefits hook-up workers by improving their capability to access health services or police protection and general attitudes towards them. However, the results of experiments with a more tolerant attitude to the lovemaking industry have been the subject of bitter dispute. On the other mitt, the Swedish model of criminalising clients, which has been hailed as a superb success in greatly reducing visible prostitution, has simply driven these activities underground, making them more hazardous for the women who work in them. Albeit we should fully support the decriminalisation of prostitution, this does not mean that we support it being regulated and managed by the state. State intervention in the hookup industry is not ultimately the way to overcome the raunch culture and sexism that exist in society, or the material conditions which make women choose prostitution or lap dancing as the best alternative open to them.

In the UK the Fresh Labour government treats prostitution as anti-social behaviour, issues hookers with Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (Asbo) and regularly announces “zero tolerance” for street prostitution. All attempts at helping or rehabilitating lovemaking workers are formulated within this punitive framework. Police have been encouraged to work more closely with charities running safe houses, sexual health outreach programmes, and drug and alcohol treatment programmes to help women get out of the lovemaking trade. However, as part of this process, women can be trussed by Asbos to attend programmes designed to encourage them to get help with drink or drug problems. Breaching an Asbo can incur a prison sentence of up to five years, and a criminal record makes it even stiffer for women to leave the hook-up trade. Forty three

The Fresh Labour Government has purported to be worried about the plight of “trafficked” women. The Poppy Project was set up in two thousand three with funding from the Office for Criminal Justice Reform. A report they published, Big Brothel, has been hugely criticised by twenty seven academics who research on the hookup industry as well as organisations who represent or work with hook-up workers. They argue that it is gravely flawed and has produced sensationalist results, which are being used to introduce legislation that puts migrant and non-migrant women who sell hookup at risk. Forty four

More recently, the Policing and Crime Bill (2009) has been sold as a benevolent feminist project by politicians such as Harriet Harman. However, our attitude to this legislation should be based on whether it protects hookup workers and their families—which it does not. The harsher definition of persistent soliciting (with “persistent” redefined as twice in a three-month period), the coerced “rehabilitation” of those arrested, the targeting of brothels for raids and closures will drive prostitution further underground, enhancing the vulnerability of those involved. Fear of arrest deters women from reporting violence or gaining access to health and other services. The majority of hookup workers are mothers who worry about protecting their children from the stigma affixed to criminalisation and the separation that results from a prison sentence. The legislation would penalise women who work from a vapid. In May two thousand nine the Royal College of Nursing voted ninety three percent in favour of up to four hook-up workers being permitted to work together legally on the grounds that decriminalisation would eliminate the stigma of prostitution, enabling lovemaking workers to access the health services they need.

Measures that prevent boys from buying lovemaking from street hookers are increasingly introduced and justified as anti-trafficking measures. However, hefty protestations have been made by groups worried with the safety, human rights and civil liberties of women who work on the street. Forty five With regard to “trafficked” women, the regulation of commercial hookup does nothing in itself to counteract racism, xenophobia or prejudice against migrants and minority ethnic groups. An end to draconian immigration controls, and granting asylum to these women would, however, instantly undercut “trafficking”.

Conclusion

Those who are exploited have the potential to challenge their alienation through collective fight, which lays nude the hidden realities of how the market predominates our lives and where the real power for switch lies. Ultimately, workers have the potential to create a socialist society in which human beings exercise democratic and collective control over their society and every aspect of their lives, including their sexual relationships.

The exploitation of women who work on the street could be ameliorated by rehabilitation programmes with real resources and treatment for drug addiction. Jail does not cure drug addiction and it certainly does not give women a route out of prostitution. To reduce the number of women involved in prostitution, the government should develop initiatives which suggest training and employment to women, and provide rehabilitative counselling and support to women who are emotionally bruised and addicted to drugs and alcohol. Women who work on the street should be released from the cargo of convictions for soliciting, enabling them to apply for jobs outside prostitution. Decriminalising prostitution and suggesting all trafficked women asylum would have a enormous influence on many of these women’s lives.

A real alternative for women who work in the broader hook-up industry cannot be divorced from the fight for real opportunities in the labour market and the fight for good quality, affordable childcare and free higher education. Women may “choose” to work on adult talk lines or as exotic dancers, because the reality of their everyday lives is that this fits better with looking after families or explore than the badly paid or inflexible alternatives on suggest.

However, while reforming the industry could help women, the aim of such reforms should be to reduce women’s dependence on selling lovemaking and sexiness, not normalising or legitimising that exchange. “Hookup work” is not a job like any other. It is not only a symptom of the most degrading and alienated aspects of life under capitalism, but also reinforces that degradation and alienation. Many jobs that people do today would still have to be done in a socialist society, but we believe that the poverty, alienation and oppression that create the conditions in which the hook-up industry flourishes would wither away. The commodification of lovemaking deprives people of choice and fulfilment in their hook-up lives. The representation of sexiness displayed in lap dancing clubs or “youngsters’ mags” does not promote sexual freedom—it makes that freedom tighter to achieve. Human beings have the potential to establish genuinely fulfilling and free sexual relationships. As Frederick Engels put it:

What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the forthcoming overthrow of capitalist production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the most part to what will vanish. But what will there be fresh? That will be answered when a fresh generation has grown up: a generation of studs who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman’s give up with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love or to deny to give themselves to their paramour from fear of the economic consequences. When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual—and that will be the end of it. Forty six

Notes

1: Times Higher Education, eleven December 2008, reviewing the work of Dr Teela Sanders.

The hookup work debate – International Socialism

The hookup work debate

Posted on 5th January two thousand ten by ISJ

The debate on “lovemaking work” has divided the trade union movement. While the GMB has attempted to organise women who work in lap dancing clubs, in two thousand nine the Trade Union Congress (TUC) Women’s Congress voted against a motility which supported the decriminalisation of the hookup industry and the unionisation of hook-up workers. Instead a movement was passed in favour of the criminalisation of the purchase of hook-up. Over the last two years the University and College Union (UCU), the Communication Workers Union (CWU) and Unison have taken different positions on this debate. Within feminist thinking there are opposed views on hookup work and violence against women. Radical feminists in alliance with neoconservatives campaign for the abolition of prostitution and, in the interim, are supporting legislation that proposes the criminalisation of studs. Other feminists, many of them academics who research in this area, as well as hook-up workers’ organisations themselves, request the decriminalisation of prostitution. They argue that, while the long-term aim is to eliminate the conditions that breed prostitution, in the brief term the priority is to keep women safe.

The language itself is very problematic and emotive. The use of the term “hooker” is regarded as a denigrating word used for women who are compelled into selling lovemaking through poverty and exclusion, while the use of the term “hookup worker” is seen as dignifying an activity which reflects and compounds women’s oppression. This article does not suggest that hook-up work is “a job like any other”—however, the term hookup work will be used, very first because it avoids the moral condemnation often linked to the word hooker. 2nd, this term is used because women who directly sell hook-up on the streets, in flats or in brothels are only a subset of a much larger number of women who work in the lovemaking industry. One The modern hookup industry is a multibillion dollar industry, which generates phat profits for both transnational corporations and criminal gangs. The hookup industry is difficult to define because it encompasses a yam-sized range of diverse activities. According to the writer Elisabeth Bernstein:

The scope of sexual commerce has grown to encompass: live hook-up shows; all multiplicity of pornographic texts, movies, and pictures, both in print and on line; fetish clubs; sexual “emporiums” featuring lap-dancing and wall-dancing; escort agencies; telephone lovemaking and cyber-sex contacts; “drive through” striptease venues; and organised hook-up tours of developing countries. Two

Accurate figures are hard to come by, but there is a general consensus that the last two decades have seen a resurgence in the international hook-up industry, including street prostitution, the voluntary or coerced migration of women to work in the hook-up industry and the proliferation of lap dancing clubs. What is certain is that the hook-up industry is hugely profitable. A European Parliament report from two thousand four estimated the global hookup industry to be worth $Five,000 billion to $7,000 billion. Three Some of the transnational corporations involved, such as Hugh Heffner’s Playboy and lap dancing chains wielded by Spearmint Rhino and Foxy Lady, are well known. However, many evidently more respectable companies make enormous profits from providing telephone lines and cable and satellite programmes, and being the internet providers for the lovemaking industry. These include GM Motors (through DirecTV), Time Warner, News International (EchoStar satellite, AT&T) and hotel chain Marriot International.

In a world where everything is for sale, activities such as lap dancing, which were once viewed as oppressive to women, are now accepted as mainstream leisure opportunities. Pole dancing lessons, which require stilettos and skimpy cut-offs, are widely advertised as the fresh way of keeping fit. Soft porn is routinely displayed at the counters of supermarkets and garages, and prostitution is glamorised on TV in programmes such as The Secret Diaries of a Call Dame. At the same time there was widespread revulsion at the murder of five youthful women working on the streets of Ipswich in 2007. This

combination of enhanced visibility, normalisation and brutal violence has revitalised a debate about how to react to prostitution and the lovemaking industry, about whether hookup workers are criminals or victims, and whether the industry should be tolerated, reformed to improve women’s lives or totally opposed as the institutionalised oppression of women. Two of the main debates have coalesced, very first around whether working in the lovemaking industry is fundamentally the same as working in other industries with the consequence that “lovemaking workers” should organise in unions just like other workers, and 2nd, whether clients should be criminalised as a way of reducing the request for paid hook-up. These debates are the concentrate of this article.

It is argued here that understanding prostitution and the broader hookup industry has to be rooted in understanding the specific oppression of women within the capitalist family unit and the enhancing commodification of hook-up as the marketplace intrudes into the most intimate aspects of human existence. In the broader sense these phenomena have to be located in the context of the dynamics of capitalist expansion, in the vast growth in the global reach of capitalism in the late 19th century and again over the last thirty years in what is loosely termed globalisation. In these two periods the factors which drive women (and much smaller numbers of dudes) to sell hookup have been transformed.

The hook-up as work debate

The notion of “hook-up work”, that selling hook-up is a job like any other, emerged in the 1970s through prostitution advocacy groups in the US such as Cast Off Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE). It is predicated on the idea that, as all lovemaking is commodified under capitalism, what can broadly be termed erotic labour is another service that can be bought or sold like any other. The result of this analysis is to argue against the criminalisation of prostitution and against attempts to eradicate prostitution altogether. Some contemporary campaigners go beyond arguing that “hookup work” is a job like any other and argue that “lovemaking work” is actually superior to other jobs that are available for women. They point to benefits in terms of working hours, autonomy, self-direction and even job satisfaction.

Some feast “lovemaking work” as an inherent human right and, in particular, as a women’s right of sexual expression and an arena in which women can exercise disproportionate control over guys. At this end of the spectrum of theories about “lovemaking work”, what began as an understanding of how economic necessity drives women into the lovemaking industry has become a celebration and expression of women’s empowerment. For example, Ana Lopez of the GMB union and the International Union of Hookup Workers (IUSW), calls prostitution a “positive choice” for women. The IUSW website argues that prostitution can be empowering for women:

People build up individual strength from selling their bods because their clients adore and admire them, they have as much hookup as they want and defy traditional mores and roles imposed on them. Often hookers are utterly healthy, playful, creative, adventurous and independent women. Four

Such arguments are accepted by academic Gregor Gall who claims of the “hookup work” discourse:

[It] has been shown to be reasonably sturdy to permit the generation of hookup, sexual services and sexual artefacts as commodities under capitalism to be categorised not just as work but as wage labour…[therefore] hookup wage labour under capitalism may be expected to be subject to the same broad impulses and dynamics of the process of capitalist accumulation that other wage labour is subject [to]. Five

Gall concludes that as “hookup work” is fundamentally the same as other forms of employment, it generates the potential for a unionisation project and the possibility of lovemaking workers exercising collective influence in order to defend and advance their interests.

At the other end of the spectrum there is abolition feminism which alleges that all commercial lovemaking is violence against women. Proposals to improve safety for lovemaking workers by legitimising their working situations are rejected as legitimising violence against women. In this view there is no qualitative difference inbetween the “violence” of a society which “compels” a woman to become a lap dancer, and violence that voices itself in hittings, rape and murder.

Inbetween these polar finishes of the spectrum socialists and feminists take a range of views. However, in order to consider these arguments it is significant to understand the relationship inbetween capitalism, prostitution and the lovemaking industry and the specific oppression of women in capitalist society.

Capitalism, prostitution and the lovemaking industry

Albeit it has been dubbed the oldest profession, prostitution has not been found in all societies. Historian N J Ringdal suggests that prostitution was a unique cultural phenomenon very first developed in Mesopotamia and later spread to surrounding cultures in Egypt, Greece and India. Six However, from ancient times, many societies in North America, the old East India and Polynesia had a high degree of freedom for women and were unacquainted with prostitution. Seven Therefore prostitution was not an unpreventable feature of early human societies. Leading Bolshevik Party member Alexandra Kollontai helped to develop a Marxist analysis of prostitution after the Russian Revolution of 1917. She drew a distinction inbetween prostitution in other eras, such as ancient Greece and Rome, and prostitution under capitalism. Eight In ancient times the number of hookers was petite and prostitution was seen as a legal complement to special family relationships. In the Middle Ages, under artisan production, prostitution was accepted as lawful and unproblematic. Hookers had their own guilds and took part in festivals and local events just like any other guilds. Nine

With the rise of capitalism that switched. Prostitution in the 19th century occurred on a much greater scale than in previous societies. It was fed by the massive social dislocation as people were driven from agriculture into the manufacturing system. The urbanisation, poverty and large scale migration which characterised 19th century capitalism produced conditions in which brothels sprang up around the globe. In his book London Labour and the London Poor, written in the 1850s, Henry Mayhew described how women in seasonal and insecure trades were frequently driven into prostitution at certain times of the year. Ten Thus milliners, whose abilities were only in request during the London society “season”, became particularly associated with prostitution. Socialist anarchist Emma Goldman quoted a explore called Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century to describe the conditions that fuelled the growth of prostitution:

Albeit prostitution has existed in all ages, it was left to the 19th century to develop it into a gigantic social institution. The development of industry with vast masses of people in the competitive market, the growth and congestion of large cities, the insecurity and uncertainty of employment, has given prostitution an impetus never dreamed of at any period in human history. Eleven

In one thousand nine hundred twenty one Kollontai claimed that in Berlin there was one hooker for every twenty “fair” women. In Paris the ratio was one to eighteen and in London one to nine. Twelve

Then as now there was a strong relationship inbetween the migration of women and prostitution. At the end of the 19th century around eighty percent of hookers in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires were very first generation immigrants from Europe. Thirteen This was true of major cities from Italy to India, with the majority of migrants being from Central and Eastern Europe. Fourteen Hysteria and moral scare focused on the growth of a “white marionette trade”. The claim that white women were being defiled by foreign and non-white fellows brought forward an alliance of reactionaries encompassing the church and politicians. However, there was little evidence that women had been kidnapped or coerced. Rather they were attempting to escape from desperate poverty and to some extent build up economic independence.

International capitalist development in the 19th century transformed prostitution into an international hookup industry. The most latest period of globalisation and restructuring of capitalist production, from the 1970s onwards, has again reshaped the lovemaking industry as it has wreaked havoc with the lives of ordinary people, women in particular. In developing countries structural adjustment programmes imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have enhanced displacement in rural areas, enlargened unemployment in urban areas and led to wage cuts and increases in poverty. In fresh production zones of South East Asia transnational corporations rail roughshod over minimum wage and health and safety laws, leaving women working in hazardous conditions. The flourishing hookup industry fills the gap left by wages paid below subsistence levels or the lack of any secure, paid employment.

Neoliberal policies have produced a gigantic polarisation inbetween super rich elites and the marginalised and despairingly poor who are often driven into the informal economy and lovemaking industry to make finishes meet. For example, Russia today is a major source of migrant lovemaking workers and a major destination for lovemaking workers. One writer has described the “erotisation of Russian culture”, in the post-Soviet era. The fresh Russian super-rich have fuelled a commercial lovemaking boom in which “prostitution was fully incorporated into both the public and private life of the post-Soviet elites, who were often to be found in expensive night clubs surrounded by call chicks”. Fifteen This has coincided with the dramatic collapse of the economy and the drying up of any alternative sources of employment. A survey in the 1990s ranked prostitution eight out of the twenty most common jobs in the country. Sixteen

The Iraq War, which has brought in its wake the destruction of the Iraqi economy and social structures, has enhanced the hookup industry. The Independent newspaper reported that an estimated 50,000 Iraqi women refugees were being driven into prostitution in Syria. Nihal Hassan reported from a hookup club in Damascus, “The make up can’t disguise the fact that most are in their mid-teens. It’s a strange view in a conservative Muslim country, but this is the lovemaking business, and it’s thriving as a result of the war in Iraq”. Seventeen The hookup industry lies at the heart of elaborate international networks of poverty, legal persecution and economic exploitation which force women into prostitution. However, these networks could not have developed in this way were it not for the continuing oppression of women in contemporary society.

The expansion of international capitalism at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries had many similarities to the current period of capitalism in terms of the internationalisation of finance, trade and investment and the hook-up industry. However, one significant distinction must be made. There was a virtual absence of immigration confinements up until the end of the Very first World War, while since the 2nd World War increasingly repressive and pervasive immigration legislation has been introduced in the developed world. Anti-immigration legislation means there is no possibility for poor and unskilled women to travel independently and work legally, so they become dependent on recruiting agencies and criminal networks. While some find low paid jobs looking after other people’s families, or cleaning and catering, others get enmeshed in the elaborate web of the hook-up industry.

Migrant women working in the hook-up industry are at risk from deportation, imprisonment, harassment and manhandle. Deportation means they end up with disastrous debts that they will never be able to pay and often face rejection by their families. In the UK government agencies consider trafficked women above all else as undesirable aliens. The fact that they may be victims of sexual violence and exploitation is totally subordinate or even irrelevant to their immigration status. Refugee organisations have accused the Home Office of choosing them as soft targets to boost deportation targets because migrant hookup workers are an effortless catch. Therefore albeit Fresh Labour politicians pay lip service to the plight of trafficked women, it is their government’s repressive immigration legislation that leaves women vulnerable to criminal gangs and treats the victims of hookup traffickers at illegal immigrants to be deported against their will.

The roots of oppression and the commodification of lovemaking

The scale and nature of prostitution and hook-up work have been and are conditioned by the poverty, polarisation and dislocation endemic to global capitalism. However, prostitution is not just another dimension of exploitation, but has to be understood in the context of women’s oppression. Women have not always been oppressed. According to Frederick Engels women’s oppression developed with the emergence of private property and was later transformed by the rise of the bourgeois family, which became the mechanism for transferring property from one generation to the next. Eighteen Modern women’s oppression was also shaped by the separation of the home from the workplace during the industrial revolution and the resulting creation of a separate sphere of private life.

Along with Engels, Bebel argued that prostitution was the roll side of marriage and a “necessary social institution of bourgeois society”. Nineteen Prostitution played a specific role because sexual interest was liquidated from the bourgeois family and assigned to hookers. Women within the family were expected to bear hookup as a means of procreating, whereas studs were deemed to have desires that could only be satiated outside the restrains of the family. Some Victorian moralists justified the existence of prostitution on this basis. As historian Leonore Davidoff has written:

Defenders of prostitution eyed it as a necessary institution which acted as a giant sewer, drawing away the distasteful, but unavoidable waste products of masculine lustfulness, leaving the middle class household and middle class ladies unspoiled and unsullied. Twenty

Alexandra Kollontai wrote that prostitution was “the unavoidable shadow of the official institution of marriage designed to preserve the rights of private property and to ensure property inheritance through a line of lawful heirs”. Twenty one This attitude helps to explain why prostitution was morally condemned but tolerated and in some countries, such as France, very regulated by the state.

Marxist accounts of the roots of women’s oppression were revived by some strands in the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In its early days the women’s movement sought to challenge the economic exploitation of women with campaigns against discrimination and for equal pay in the workplace. The movement also campaigned for 24-hour childcare, equal access to education and jobs and the extension of women’s control over their own fertility through access to contraception and abortion. Women challenged stereotypes about their appearance and the dual standards applied to their sexiness, which sanctioned guys’s sexual activity while castigating women who exercised the same freedom.

However, the gains made by the women’s movement were not sustained. One wing of the movement retreated into the politics of the individual and substituted individual lifestyles for collective fight while the other, the socialist-feminists, harnessed themselves to the Labour Party. The result of this was to gravely weaken the movement’s capability to challenge inequality in the workplace and women’s oppression in general. The demise of the women’s movement, coupled with the enhanced marketisation of lovemaking, laid the way open for a resurgence in fresh forms of sexism, the so-called ironic sexism which has led to the normalisation of “youngsters’ mags”, pornography and lap dancing clubs.

Today women participate more widely in the workforce than ever before, and albeit some gains have been made, genuine equality is a long way off. Albeit the ideology of the nuclear family is stronger than the reality, the family remains central to capitalism in terms of reproducing labour and fulfilling welfare functions. The oppression of women and the continued existence of the family are generated by the interests of capitalism which is best served by pushing the cargo of social welfare onto individual families. Women are left to cope with a post-feminist ideology that tells them that they are equal and liberated, whereas the reality is one of unequal pay, responsibility for childcare and sexist discrimination.

Capitalism in the 21st century has enhanced the objectification of women and the commodification of hookup. Lovemaking is used everywhere, to sell everything. The social relationships that create the possibility of an industry for hook-up are deeply rooted in the structures of capitalism itself. The dominance of market competition over private relationships creates a situation where human desires are transformed into commodities which can be sold for a profit. In his early writings Marx described how, in capitalist society:

Each attempt to establish over the other an alien power, in the hope of thereby achieving satisfaction of his own selfish needs…becomes the inventive and ever calculating sub of inhuman, refined, unnatural and imaginary appetites. He places himself at the disposition of his neighbour’s most depraved fancies, panders to his needs, excites unhealthy appetites in him, and pounces on every weakness, so that he can then request the money for his labour of love. Twenty two

Today we have become so used to a situation where all our human needs have been transformed into commodities that it seems almost natural. In their rapacious search for fresh markets to exploit, capitalist organisations probe more and more deeply into all aspects of our lives and in the process convert them further. Thus money can buy anything, including the simulation of love, but on the other side of the coin, all our human desires and abilities contract into a concentrate on consuming or what Marx called a sense of having:

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when we directly wield, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc, in brief, when we use it. Twenty three

Our capability to practice sexual pleasure is alienated from us and turned into a commodity which we then desire to consume. But this process converts sexual confidence and satisfaction into goals which recede further and further from our reach. In her book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and The Rise of Raunch Culture, Ariel Levy shows how the growing commodification of hook-up and objectification of women’s bods has become increasingly divorced and disconnected from sexual pleasure and fulfilment. Twenty four

The hook-up industry now shows up to be setting the agenda for numerous TV programmes, which showcase how women are encouraged to seek individual happiness by being surgically, cosmetically and sartorially tweaked into conforming to certain sexual stereotypes. In the US breast augmentation rose by seven hundred percent inbetween one thousand nine hundred ninety two and 2004. In some South American countries this procedure is a standard bounty for a daughter at Legal. Twenty five Increasingly, women are even ready to go through a “vaginoplasty” in which their vulva and labia are surgically altered to make them look like those of porn starlets in Playboy. There could be no more graphic example of how women in particular are alienated from their bods to such an extent that they are ready to pay for someone to cut and stitch them into a form they are told will make them desirable to others.

Hook-up is not immune from the conditions which form all aspects of our lives. All sexiness is shaped by the material conditions and social priorities of the society we live in, but the open treatment of hookup as a commodity to be sold on the market is not just another aspect of that process. Sexiness is regarded as one of the last intimate aspects of ourselves. Hook-up is a part of our human nature, an practice that can be fulfilling and a central part of an individual’s identity. As one economist put it:

Prostitution is the classic example of how commodification debases a bounty’s value and its giver, as it demolishes the kind of reciprocity required to realise human sexiness as a collective good and the mutual recognition of each fucking partner’s needs. Twenty six

Openness about lovemaking and expectations of sexual fulfilment were key requests of the women’s liberation movement. However, the sexual freedom fought for in the 1960s and 1970s has been crooked and repackaged as commodities. The selling of sexiness to clients converts the figure into an object, a thing for someone else to use. All aspirations to autonomy and private satisfaction are fiercely stripped away by commercial hook-up which degrades both women and dudes and reinforces the most backward prejudices against women.

Organising hook-up workers

After the Russian Revolution of one thousand nine hundred seventeen the Bolsheviks believed that prostitution was incompatible with the aspiration for sexual equality. They revoked all laws concerning prostitution and the very first All Russian Congress of Peasants and Working Women adopted the slogan “A woman of the Soviet Labour Republic is a free citizen with equal rights, and cannot be and must not be the object of buying and selling.” Despite these proclamations prostitution in Russia grew after 1917, mainly due to the harsh economic circumstances that prevailed. It was dealt with inconsistently with brothels operating openly in some areas, while in others hookers were arrested.

Kollontai’s view was that prostitution was wrong, not on moral grounds, but because it stopped women contributing to the socialist society. Further, she argued that prostitution represented a threat to the fresh socialist morality because it ruined solidarity and comradeship in the working class. Therefore the fight against prostitution took place on two fronts: the very first to secure economic equality for women and their participation in the labour force, the 2nd to undermine the existence of the family as the source of women’s oppression by introducing collective canteens, laundries and nurseries. Twenty seven

There was also a upbeat exchange on the issue of prostitution and sexiness inbetween German socialist and campaigner for women’s rights Clara Zetkin and Lenin. Lenin recognised that hookers were dual victims of bourgeois society—”victims, very first of its accursed system of property and secondly of its accursed moral hypocrisy”. However, he condemned the efforts by a Communist woman in Hamburg to organise hookers as a “morbid deviation”. He argued that socialists should concentrate on organising women where they had collective power, in the workplaces, and thus convert the entire of society. Zetkin was herself contemptuous of the “empty chatter of bourgeois women” who moralised about the evils of prostitution—she argued that without well paid work for women, any discussion of abolishing prostitution was nonsense. Twenty eight

Some campaigners and academics argue that prostitution is a job like any other in that hook-up workers negotiate rates of pay for the service they perform, and have control over their working conditions and exercise more autonomy than women in many other low-paid, low-status jobs. However, the possibility of collective organisation at work rests on the sharing of conditions, a common employer, and collective grievances, which can be opposed.

Hookup workers face massive barriers in their capacity to organise collectively to improve pay and conditions. Women involved in street prostitution are marginalised, isolated and desperate, where there is little possibility of fighting for collective rates for the job, of negotiating collectively with clients or contributing to pension schemes. In the UK women who work on the streets are mostly those excluded from society, such as runaway teenagers, drug junkies and undocumented migrants turning to prostitution as a means of survival. It is by no means clear that they would wish to be incorporated into civil society as a “hookup worker”, even if this option was open to them. Not everyone who sells hook-up thinks of themselves as a “lovemaking worker” or wishes to be recognised as such. Twenty nine

While this may be the case for women working on the streets of the UK historically, in parts of the developed world the situation may be more complicated. During the 19th century and very first part of the 20th century there were many examples of hookers organising and protesting against maltreatment. The current Uruguayan lovemaking workers’ organisation has the seeds of its history in the fight of Grind hookers during the 19th century. Everyday resistance is documented from the mid-19th century in Lucknow (India), and Guatamala, and in colonial Kenya in the 1920s and 1930s. Thirty There were significant swings of lovemaking workers’ organising in the 1970s and then in the early 1990s in response to HIV/AIDs. A third wave of organising shows up to be emerging significantly in India and Argentina. The Karnataka Hookup Workers Union, established in India in 2006, has specifically constituted itself as a trade union, affiliating to the Fresh Trade Union Initiative (NTUI) which has organised other informal workers. They have assisted in enrolling women in the electoral register, struggled against the criminalisation of clients and lobbied the government about violence against hook-up workers. Thirty one

In two thousand one in Argentina the Asociación de Mujeres Meretrices de la Argentina (AMMAR) hookup workers’ organisation became an official affiliate member of the Central de los Trabajadores de la Argentina trade union federation (CTA). Albeit subject to debate in the movement, their membership went beyond a token gesture. The CTA used resources to support women against manhandle, while AMMAR branch secretaries took on responsibilities as elected members of the CTA. Thirty two There was no suggestion that hook-up work was desirable or fulfilling, but as (often) single parents it was the best option available to feed themselves and their families. In the words of one of the members of AMMAR their aspiration was:

That one day there are no more women that exercise this work for necessity, however, as we are not the owners of the truth we leave open the discussion as to whether—in the future we desire of—there will be women that all the same want to do this work. Thirty three

The rise of lap dancing clubs

The hook-up industry extends beyond the direct exchange of money for lovemaking. Lap dancing clubs are a concrete manifestation of the lovemaking industry which socialists need to address. Very first, these have been the very places in which there is deemed to be “erotic” labour and which have been targeted for union recruitment by the GMB trade union. 2nd, as socialists or activists in our communities, we have to take a view as to whether it is acceptable that these are located in our areas.

Lap dancing clubs are an significant aspect of the industry because they are introduced as its respectable face. Clubs like Spearmint Rhino have managed to build up an air of respectability, thanks to slick marketing and celebrity endorsements. Whereas undress clubs and brothels are seen as sordid and distasteful, lap dancing clubs are seen as an essential part of “lad” culture—somewhere that “city boys” can spend their bloated bonuses. Even worse is that taking staff to a club, buying drinks and paying for women to dance are legitimate business expenses and companies can claim back fifteen percent VAT. Thirty four This reflects the entrenched discrimination and sexism in the financial sector. In this “ironic” and post-feminist culture attendance is not special to studs. Women are dismissed as puritans and spoilsports if they do not join in.

Lap dancing has been described as “the fastest growing area in Britain’s lovemaking industry”. There are one hundred fifty clubs in the UK and twenty in London and they are estimated to generate £1 billion per year. Thirty five One factor in the proliferation of these clubs is the two thousand three Licensing Act, which introduced the one size fits all premises licence, meaning that unwrap clubs are no longer required to get special permission for nakedness. Some have suggested that lap dancing is downright separate from the lovemaking industry and is simply one among many leisure activities open to ordinary people. The previous proprietor of For Your Eyes Only, Alan Whitehead, dismissed criticisms of his contribution to the lovemaking industry and argued, “Sure they take their clothes off, but they’re not strippers. They’re dancers”. Thirty six

Lap dancing is promoted as a job where women can make lots of money and have some power and autonomy. For the vast majority of women this is sheer nonsense. All lap dancers in clubs are self-employed, relying on tips and income from private dances. Dancers pay inbetween £35 and £100 per night to the club management to “rent” facilities such as poles, cabaret areas, private dance booths and VIP suites. This self-employment is not liberatory but keeps women permanently insecure and subservient. The women are not in control, autonomous or empowered—they are stringently monitored and managed.

Switches in the law reclassifying lap dancing clubs as “hookup encounter institutions” should be welcomed, albeit cautiously. Radical feminists such as Julie Bindel have been ready to make alliances with right wing groups to call on the state to get lap dancing clubs banned. Socialists should have no truck lining up with such people. Beyond opposing moralistic arguments we do not see the solution as providing more power to the state, as the state is a means of oppression, not liberation. For example, in 1984, the Obscene Publications Act (1959) was used to raid the Gay’s the Word bookshop and seize hundreds of books as part of the moral backlash under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government.

The influence of lap dancing clubs on localities goes far beyond what actually takes place inwards them. It means that women who live and work in these areas are more likely to be subject to manhandle and harassment. In two thousand six the Respect group in Tower Hamlets council argued against the extension of licences for lap dancing clubs on the grounds that they degraded and exploited women and were part of Fresh Labour’s idea of regenerating inward cities by repackaging them as playgrounds for the rich. The City of London Corporation does not permit hookup clubs or lap dancing venues. Instead taxi fountains of stockbrokers from the City head to disadvantaged areas on the edge of the City, like Tower Hamlets.

Lap dancing clubs are symptomatic of the broader way in which the hookup industry has been normalised and come to be viewed as acceptable. Before two thousand three Jobcentre Plus (the UK government employment agency) did not advertise vacancies from within the “adult entertainment” industry. It would have meant that people not considering this type of employment could have risked their benefit entitlements. After a legal challenge from Ann Summers Ltd in two thousand three this decision was reversed. Inbetween two thousand six and 2007, three hundred fifty one jobs were advertised in government job centres, including pole dancers, “adult” talk line workers, masseuses and escorts. Thirty seven

Some campaigners for rights for hookup workers argue that erotic dancing is adult entertainment, not a sexual service, and that this group of workers should have access to the same employment rights and protection as other workers in the economy. In two thousand one “erotic dancers” and others working in the hook-up industry were invited to join the GMB. The GMB has adopted the International Union Lovemaking of Workers (IUSW) definition, which encompasses “any workers who use their figure and/or their sexiness to earn a living”. In two thousand four it had a branch of one hundred fifty members, mainly lap and table dancers. The unions signed a recognition agreement with two lap dancing clubs and maintain that working conditions and terms of employment have since improved. Codes of conduct and grievance procedures have been introduced, and union representatives been elected in those two clubs. However well intentioned the GMB, it is not clear that such organising has gone beyond a token presence in the industry. If the women who work in these places are able to organise to improve their wages and working conditions, then of course socialists must support them. Our quarrel is not with the women who work in them, but with the big firms and individuals who make vast sums for commodifying hook-up and trading on the objectification of women.

Socialists should oppose lap dancing clubs because they are an integral part of the hookup industry. Their very existence helps to perpetuate the oppression of women. Lap dancing clubs are not normal workplaces, and attempts to characterise them as such must be resisted. Whether the dancers have union rights or not, the clubs function on the basis of the objectification of women and package them as objects available for the sexual gratification of others. The existence of lap dancing clubs makes it tighter to fight against the idea that women should be valued according to how well they conform to physical stereotypes or how sexually available they are.

Criminalising studs?

Rather than criminalising lovemaking workers themselves, some governments have sought to criminalise the fellows who solicit or pay for sexual services. One of the contentious clauses of the UK’s Police and Crime Bill (2009) has been the proposal to criminalise boys who buy lovemaking. The argument is that shifting the cargo of blame to clients will bring about a reduction in prostitution. This has been strongly opposed by a broad range of organisations and representatives of hook-up workers as making things more dangerous as it drives activity underground where women are less protected. Thirty eight

In Sweden a one thousand nine hundred ninety eight law criminalised the buying of hookup, a strategy which embodied elements of a feminist treatment that sees prostitution as a disturbance of women akin to rape. Street prostitution in Sweden has fallen, but prostitution via the internet has risen, which some suggest could have happened independently of the legislation. Furthermore, lovemaking worker organisations have pointed out that the criminalisation of their clients only shoves them into darker, less frequented areas, making them more vulnerable. Women who work on the streets are the most marginalised of all lovemaking workers and they suffer the most from such legislation. O’Connell Davidson suggests that calling on the state to penalise buyers of lovemaking has encouraged some feminists to forge alliances with repressive compels of the state and reactionary coerces. She argues that this has involved:

Police chiefs calling for more extensive police powers and tougher sentencing policy, anti-immigration politicians calling for tighter border controls, and moral conservatives urging a comeback to “family values”. Thirty nine

It is very difficult to identify the factors which propel boys into paying for lovemaking: their motives are diverse and there are many obstacles to any open discussion of the subject. The “punter” of popular myth is the sad, inadequate figure who cannot relate to women. However, Paying the Price, a two thousand four government consultation paper, found that the typical customer was “a man of around thirty years of age, married, in full-time employment, and with no criminal convictions”. Forty Today the number of fellows visiting hookers, or admitting to it, is enlargening. The Independent quotes a two thousand five explore published in the British Medical Journal which found that the proportion of British fellows paying for hookup had gone up from Five.6 percent in one thousand nine hundred ninety to almost 8.8 percent in 2000. Dr Helen Ward, lead author of the report, points to growing divorce rates, hookup tourism like stag holidays and the enhancing availability of commercial hook-up through such means as the internet as reasons for the growth in masculine participation:

It’s far more acceptable to visit a hooker. The lovemaking industry is far more visible. Anyone with a WAP phone or a computer can find hookup to buy. It’s part of the commercialisation of everything—these days we expect to buy anything we want when we want it. Forty one

Guys may turn to buying lovemaking because they work long hours, are isolated from social networks or are part of a transient population. But they are also encouraged to think that they should be having hook-up and that women’s figures are just another commodity that can be bought, like a car or a plasma TV. There is nothing unpreventable about this situation. As Julia O’Connell Davidson has argued:

Human beings are not born wishing to buy commercial hook-up services or visit lap dancing clubs, any more than they are born with specific desires to play the lottery or drink Coca-Cola. They have to learn to imagine that it would be pleasurable to pay a stranger to dance naked for them; they have to be trained that consuming such services is a signifier of the fact that they are having joy, a marker of their social identity and status as “a real man”, “adult”, “not gay” or whatever. Forty two

It is capitalist society, with its sexist social structures and rampant consumerism, that is the educator.

State accommodation or repression

State responses to the lovemaking industry have historically combined the repression of hookers with a tacit acknowledgement that prostitution cannot be eradicated and so must be regulated. One of the most famous examples of the former came in one thousand eight hundred sixty four when the British government passed the very first of three Contagious Diseases Acts which applied to eleven garrison and port towns. The acts were a response to soaring levels of venereal disease in the armed coerces which were so crucial to the British Empire. The acts permitted police officers to arrest women they thought might be hookers and force them to bear a abjecting and painful internal examination for signs of venereal disease. Women with such diseases could be restricted in a “lock hospital” for up to three months. All working class women in the designated towns were vulnerable to manhandle and arrest. A national campaign compelled the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, but the attitudes they embodied were enshrined in further legislation which followed.

Today most state responses are framed by two opposing political perspectives. The very first sees prostitution as morally reprehensible and an affront to moral decency, which must be eradicated, and the 2nd sees hook-up as a commodity like any other and seeks to regulate the lovemaking industry. Neither works to reduce the exploitation involved in the hookup industry.

Some campaigners, such as the English Collective of Hookers, point to Fresh Zealand’s decriminalisation of prostitution in two thousand three as the model to be emulated. Campaigners point to how decriminalisation benefits hook-up workers by improving their capability to access health services or police protection and general attitudes towards them. However, the results of experiments with a more tolerant attitude to the hookup industry have been the subject of bitter dispute. On the other palm, the Swedish model of criminalising clients, which has been hailed as a superb success in greatly reducing visible prostitution, has simply driven these activities underground, making them more hazardous for the women who work in them. Albeit we should fully support the decriminalisation of prostitution, this does not mean that we support it being regulated and managed by the state. State intervention in the hookup industry is not ultimately the way to overcome the raunch culture and sexism that exist in society, or the material conditions which make women choose prostitution or lap dancing as the best alternative open to them.

In the UK the Fresh Labour government treats prostitution as anti-social behaviour, issues hookers with Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (Asbo) and regularly proclaims “zero tolerance” for street prostitution. All attempts at helping or rehabilitating hook-up workers are formulated within this punitive framework. Police have been encouraged to work more closely with charities running safe houses, sexual health outreach programmes, and drug and alcohol treatment programmes to help women get out of the lovemaking trade. However, as part of this process, women can be corded by Asbos to attend programmes designed to encourage them to get help with drink or drug problems. Breaching an Asbo can incur a prison sentence of up to five years, and a criminal record makes it even stiffer for women to leave the hook-up trade. Forty three

The Fresh Labour Government has purported to be worried about the plight of “trafficked” women. The Poppy Project was set up in two thousand three with funding from the Office for Criminal Justice Reform. A report they published, Big Brothel, has been hugely criticised by twenty seven academics who research on the lovemaking industry as well as organisations who represent or work with hook-up workers. They argue that it is earnestly flawed and has produced sensationalist results, which are being used to introduce legislation that puts migrant and non-migrant women who sell hook-up at risk. Forty four

More recently, the Policing and Crime Bill (2009) has been sold as a benevolent feminist project by politicians such as Harriet Harman. However, our attitude to this legislation should be based on whether it protects hookup workers and their families—which it does not. The harsher definition of persistent soliciting (with “persistent” redefined as twice in a three-month period), the compelled “rehabilitation” of those arrested, the targeting of brothels for raids and closures will drive prostitution further underground, enlargening the vulnerability of those involved. Fear of arrest deters women from reporting violence or gaining access to health and other services. The majority of hook-up workers are mothers who worry about protecting their children from the stigma linked to criminalisation and the separation that results from a prison sentence. The legislation would penalise women who work from a vapid. In May two thousand nine the Royal College of Nursing voted ninety three percent in favour of up to four lovemaking workers being permitted to work together legally on the grounds that decriminalisation would liquidate the stigma of prostitution, enabling hookup workers to access the health services they need.

Measures that prevent dudes from buying lovemaking from street hookers are increasingly introduced and justified as anti-trafficking measures. However, meaty protestations have been made by groups worried with the safety, human rights and civil liberties of women who work on the street. Forty five With regard to “trafficked” women, the regulation of commercial lovemaking does nothing in itself to counteract racism, xenophobia or prejudice against migrants and minority ethnic groups. An end to draconian immigration controls, and granting asylum to these women would, however, instantaneously undercut “trafficking”.

Conclusion

Those who are exploited have the potential to challenge their alienation through collective fight, which lays naked the hidden realities of how the market predominates our lives and where the real power for switch lies. Ultimately, workers have the potential to create a socialist society in which human beings exercise democratic and collective control over their society and every aspect of their lives, including their sexual relationships.

The exploitation of women who work on the street could be ameliorated by rehabilitation programmes with real resources and treatment for drug addiction. Jail does not cure drug addiction and it certainly does not give women a route out of prostitution. To reduce the number of women involved in prostitution, the government should develop initiatives which suggest training and employment to women, and provide rehabilitative counselling and support to women who are emotionally bruised and addicted to drugs and alcohol. Women who work on the street should be released from the cargo of convictions for soliciting, enabling them to apply for jobs outside prostitution. Decriminalising prostitution and suggesting all trafficked women asylum would have a massive influence on many of these women’s lives.

A real alternative for women who work in the broader hook-up industry cannot be divorced from the fight for real opportunities in the labour market and the fight for good quality, affordable childcare and free higher education. Women may “choose” to work on adult talk lines or as exotic dancers, because the reality of their everyday lives is that this fits better with looking after families or explore than the badly paid or inflexible alternatives on suggest.

However, while reforming the industry could help women, the aim of such reforms should be to reduce women’s dependence on selling hook-up and sexiness, not normalising or legitimising that exchange. “Hook-up work” is not a job like any other. It is not only a symptom of the most degrading and alienated aspects of life under capitalism, but also reinforces that degradation and alienation. Many jobs that people do today would still have to be done in a socialist society, but we believe that the poverty, alienation and oppression that create the conditions in which the hookup industry flourishes would wither away. The commodification of hookup deprives people of choice and fulfilment in their lovemaking lives. The representation of sexiness displayed in lap dancing clubs or “twinks’ mags” does not promote sexual freedom—it makes that freedom stiffer to achieve. Human beings have the potential to establish genuinely fulfilling and free sexual relationships. As Frederick Engels put it:

What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the oncoming overthrow of capitalist production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the most part to what will vanish. But what will there be fresh? That will be answered when a fresh generation has grown up: a generation of dudes who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman’s capitulate with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love or to turn down to give themselves to their paramour from fear of the economic consequences. When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual—and that will be the end of it. Forty six

Notes

1: Times Higher Education, eleven December 2008, reviewing the work of Dr Teela Sanders.

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