Rev Left Radio - Proletarian Feminism, Women's Liberation, and the Sex Trade

Episode Date: May 12, 2021

Brigid Ó Coileáin and Esperanza Fonseca join Breht to discuss proletarian and Marxist feminism, the history and power dynamics of the sex trade, the rhetoric and ideology of liberal feminism, the role pornography plays in society, the importance of anti-imperialism for women's emancipation, and much, much more! Check out the Probably Cancelled Podcast here: https://probablycancelledpod.libsyn.com/website Check out Esperanza's writings here: https://proletarianfeminist.medium.com/ Learn more here: https://linktr.ee/estrellaroja   ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, I have my friends and comrades Bridget and Esperanza on to talk about proletarian feminism, the sex trade, and a lot of issues which are ostensibly controversial on the left, but from a principled Marxist perspective, a lot of them really shouldn't be. I really admire the bravery of these two women who constantly face a backlash for being outspoken on this crucial topic and trying to educate other people on it and for really just standing their ground and refusing to back down in the face of that backlash. I've been a fan of their voices on social media, the probably canceled podcast and Esperanza's writings, which again I'll link to in the show notes for people that want to follow up and learn more about this topic. But this is a really, really important discussion and a really, really good one. Like I said, they're both incredibly knowledgeable, have firsthand experience, and are rooted in a genuinely Marxist and materialist and dialectical analysis, which brings a lot of light to this issue. And as always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, we are 100% listener supported.

You can join us at patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio. in exchange for your generous support, you get access to bonus monthly content. Without further ado, let's get into this wonderful conversation with Bridget and Esperanza. Enjoy. Hi comrades. My name is Esperanza Fonseca. I'm based in California. I am a proletarian feminist, an organizer. I organize workers and tenants. And also I am a a survivor of the sex trade, and recently I've been doing a lot of writing and research on the topic of sexual exploitation, women, and imperialism, and really excited to be here today. Hi, comrades. My name is Bridget O'Quillin. I'm an educator. I work with the youth. I'm a student, a communist, and I'm also just a regular working class person. I'm not an academic, by any means. And I'm also one of the hosts of the probably canceled podcast, which is a new

revolutionary feminist podcast dedicated to uplifting proletarian voices, as well as combating liberal feminism. And I'm also a longtime listener of the show. So thanks so much for inviting me today, Brett. Yeah, absolutely. I'm honored and pleasure to have both of you on. Big fan of the podcast, big fan of Esperanza's writings. and this is a topic that I've wanted to cover in the right way for a long time.

And as I said, before we started recording, I couldn't ask for two better human beings to come on and discuss this very important topic with. So with all of that said, let's go ahead and dive into it because it is going to be a pretty long and an intense discussion. And I think thinking of different ways about how to start it, I think it would be helpful to start this conversation with a breakdown of some of the common terminology before diving deeper into the topic. And often in these discussions, we hear terms like sex work or the right to exit or the sex trade. And you also hear terms like swerf, tossed around a lot.

So I was hoping that both of you could sort of break these terms down for us, as well as any others that you might think are important in this conversation and define some of the terminology that you'll be using throughout this conversation. Sure. So as far as the terminology, sex worker versus sex trade and people in the sex trade, and people in the sex trade, trade. We think it's important to distinguish that rather than using the terms sex work and sex workers, we prefer to use the term sex trade and people in the sex trade. The reason for this is because the term sex trade applies broadly to the industry as a whole. And of the estimated 41 million people working in the trade globally, the majority are those who do so through financial coercion on the basis of poverty and through the mode of human trafficking.

And we prefer to center these people in our analysis, whereas the terms sex work and sex worker tend to imply a level of agency and also typically refer to a smaller portion of the people in the sex trade. So it's a very important distinction that we don't conflate people being coerced and trafficked with those who do choose to enter the trade by calling everyone quote unquote sex workers. Yeah, and I think it's really important to affirm that a lot of people use the term sex work because they come from a very well-intentioned place of seeing the stigma and backlash that people, specifically women in the sex industry get. However, I also think it's important that we really expose the underlying pollution.

project of the term. You know, in my own research and Bridget's as well, we've looked at how the term sex work was actually coined by a neoliberal feminist, who herself was actually quite financially well off, was in college, and fantasized about entering prostitution. She said that she found it thrilling and exciting. in the same way as hitchhiking was. And so it really is just sort of could not be more different than the experience of the majority of the Army of Labor and the sex trade

who don't sort of have this like fantasy and this sort of, you know, tourist entrance. Additionally, in the essay where she actually coins the term sex work, she starts off her essay with, you know, talking about how she, she was so disenchanted by the left based off of her parents having, you know, her parents were socialist and their comrades were supporting Stalin. And apparently to her, that was the wrong thing to do. So we see that the term sex work, you know, was born out of this sort of anti-communism during the rise of postmodernism created by someone in the imperial core who really wanted to mask the actual

exploitation of the industry. It conflate so many different things from strippers to porn actors to cam models to people with premium snapchats, to sugar babies, that it's really difficult to actually make a scientific analysis based off of that term. And the more politically, it's used to sanitize the global sex trade. It's used to obscure the force and coercion involved. It is used to ignore its role in. colonization, capital accumulation, and imperialist wars. And also, it takes the onus of responsibility

off of the people who profit and benefit from the sex trade and puts it on the people who are surviving day to day in the sex trade themselves. And so for that reason, we prefer to use other terms, not out of stigma or shame, but out of scientific accuracy and not wanting to buy into the political project that is behind the term sex work. Really well said. And another term gets thrown around a lot in these discussions, which is radfem or radical feminist. Before we move on, would either of you or both of you like to make a distinction between

radical feminism and proletarian feminism and some of the weaknesses that you find in radical feminism specifically? Sure. So that's actually a really good question. radical feminism itself did arise out of Marxist feminism in the mid-1900s. And so it is based in a more materialist analysis than, say, mainstream liberal feminism today. But both Esperanza and myself consider ourselves to be proletarian feminists and not radical feminists. For a few very important reasons, one of the main distinctions is that for radical feminists,

they tend to view the main enemy of women's emancipation as being men and the patriarchy being men. But I would say as a proletarian feminist, that our main enemy as feminists and as people who push for women's emancipation would be class society itself. So we need to unite with proletarian men in order to attain women's emancipation. and I don't think we can do it without them, whereas radical feminists tend to separate themselves from men in general. Yeah, and there's also the element of sort of rampant transphobia on the radfem side of things. Would you want to speak on that a little bit, either of you? Yeah, so basically, you know, continuing the critique of radical feminism that comes from Anuradha Gandhi, radical feminists consider the main contradiction to be between men and women, with men and women defined as fixed and distinct biological categories.

And therefore, that leads to a lot of errors in their analysis. I think it's important to note that not all radical feminists are transphobic or are trans misogynist. However, if we're being honest and making an honest assessment, transphobia is quite rampant within that tendency, within that feminist trend. And so while radical feminism, you know, shares a common origin point with us, you know, the early radical feminists were inspired by the cultural revolution. And while radical feminism has made several contributions, you know, to our understanding of different issues, their errors in their analysis often lead them towards biological essentialism and to seeing all men defined as biological males as the enemy. And so I believe that, you know, that sort of leads them into transphobia, whereas we, again, you know, do not consider that contradiction to be the primary contradiction and we consider it to be class. and we understand that not only our men are comrades proletarian men but so are proletarian trans people

absolutely absolutely another important crucial distinction to get out there is the distinction between critiquing the industry as such and critiquing the people within it and all of us care deeply about other people and about women and nothing we are going to say in this episode is an attack on those in the sex trade do either of you both of you want to elaborate on that a little bit before we move forward. Sure, yeah, this is a really crucial distinction to make, and we want to be extremely clear that in critiquing the industry of the sex trade, we are in no way attacking individuals who participate within the trade.

We are both former participants in the sex trade ourselves, and I personally have no shame surrounding my involvement in the past, nor would I ever shame anyone for being involved in the sex. trade currently. But as Marxists, just like we critique the oil industry or Amazon, we don't attack the individual workers. So we can critique the sex trade, but not critique the individuals who are utilizing the trade in order to survive under capitalism. And I think that's an extremely crucial distinction to be making here. Yeah. And I really just want to echo that, which is that there is never any shame in surviving.

Society, bourgeois society is so hypocritical with their hypocritical morality that condemns those of us who have to do different things to survive. And you see this even in bourgeois research and journalism, which always focuses on the moral failings of the woman in prostitution. And we wholesale reject that. we want to focus on the failings of a society which pushes people into the sex trade as the only resort of survival. We want to focus on a society that indoctrines men to see women and to see other men of lower classes as commodities. And so none of this should be interpreted as wanting to increase any stigma or any criminalization of women and people that we,

would consider to be our comrades and a part of the same revolutionary subject as us. Yeah, absolutely. And you've also mentioned this continuum of agency. There are some, you know, people engaged in the sex trade who you would rightfully call sex workers who operate sort of outside the confines of real economic coercion. And I think one of your guests on probably canceled Bridget made this point as well that she knew somebody who was engaged in the work. completely sort of outside of those pressures of economic coercion.

Would you want to touch on that really quickly before we move on? Yeah. So there are people who do enter the sex trade out of their own free will because they actually enjoy it. They do exist, particularly in the West. They do exist. The reality, though, the material reality of the industry is that the vast majority of people entering the trade are doing so.

based off of poverty and attempting to survive. So we want to make sure that we are centering these people, the vast majority, particularly women and children of the Global South, in our analysis. Totally. And by calling them all sex workers, putting them all in that category, it obscures that continuum of agency and assumes within that very terminology that agency is sort of equally present in everybody who engages in this. And I think it's very important to point that out as you did.

Exactly, yeah. Esperanza, anything else to add to that? I just wanted to add one more thing, which is that, you know, even those of us who enter perhaps initially out of what we would call our free will, I think it's extremely important to say that unless you are independently wealthy, the moment that you rely on the sex trade full time to pay your bills, to pay your rent to feed yourself, consent is out of the question because one day you might wake up and you might not want to have sex. You might not want to let men access your body, but your rent

depends on it and therefore you have to do it. And so the only people that actually do this out of their free will are those who are independently wealthy. But consent goes out the door the moment that you do this full time. Absolutely crucial point. And we'll talk a little bit more about economic coercion and particularly the downward economic pressure of the pandemic later on in this discussion. But moving forward, we've talked about the distinction between radical feminism and proletarian feminism, and I think even a bigger sort of contradiction or dichotomy, and this discussion is that between liberal feminism, broadly conceived, and proletarian feminism. So what is the liberal feminist approach to sex work today, so-called sex work,

and how does it differ from a principled Marxist feminist approach? And as another question, what have Marxist thinkers throughout history had to say about prostitution, for example? Yeah, absolutely. So in terms of the liberal feminist approach to the sex trade, so it is based around, you know, intense individualism, right? It is an analysis that does not focus on the sex trade as a globalized and organized industry. and market, it focuses on the individual interaction and the individual choices of the person in the sex train. It is focused on a kind of decontextualized agency, which, you know, looks at, you know, agency as something that is divorced from its economic and social context.

It is a historical because it does not actually look at the sex trade throughout history. and it often relies on different myths. For example, that the sex trade is the world's oldest profession or that it has existed in every society. And it also really ignores the role of imperialism and colonization and class domination on the sex trade. Now, one thing that I think most people in the imperial core here in the U.S. probably do not know is that Marxist thinkers and communist revolutionaries

throughout history have all been sex trade abolitionists. And it makes sense because in socialism, we want to move away from the commodity form. We want to produce things for their use value so that they could serve the people, not for their exchange value so that we could profit. So obviously, we would not want to be pushing women into a trade where we use them only for their exchange value, right? So, you know, everyone from Alexandra Colontai, Marx, Angles, Thomas Sankara, to even the parties and revolutionary movements today,

whether in the Philippines or in India, have all been sex trade abolitionists. Yeah, and I think the Western left, has unfortunately overall adopted the position that the sex trade is above critique, and I find this very odd, especially considering the popularity of movements such as the Me Too movement, for many people, the analysis of rape culture ends at the Me Too movement and does not extend into greater territory, such as the buying and selling of people for the sake of men's sexual gratification. and Western leftist discourse has for some decades now been infiltrated by this liberal rhetoric when it comes to many talking points, but this is especially true when it comes to the topic of the sex trade. While the communist line has always been to oppose exploitation and especially sexual exploitation, the liberal feminist idea of the sex trade is that it's empowering. for women. And that idea has been gaining in popularity in recent decades. But it's interesting to note that the Western left seems to only cherish the free market when it comes to the

buying and selling of women's bodies. Capitalist class will also do anything in their power to control the narratives on all industries. And this is not something that the sex trade or the sex industry is excluded from as far as manipulation in the media is concerned. And I mean, we all know the phrase sex sells, right? And this is an industry that rakes in billions upon billions of dollars each year globally. And the marketing ploy that the sex trade equals women's empowerment is one of the most genius capitalist ploys. And they're essentially repackaging patriarchy and attempting to sell it back to us as women's empowerment.

But from forced sex exploitation alone, the industry profits at about $100 billion per year. So there are definite financial interests among the capitalists involved who want to promote a version of quote unquote sex work that is synonymous with women's empowerment and sexual liberation, while also intentionally obscuring the sexist, racist, and classist nature of how this industry operates as a whole, in which the most marginalized of every community depend upon selling their bodies to the service of men in order to survive. So this includes women, children, people in the LGBTQ community, and even men who are being coerced into the sex trait due to poverty or forced into it by traffic. there's also on the topic of labor theory workers do not sell their bodies rather they sell their labor power and when there are no jobs left willing to buy labor power or a person is confined to a life of poverty the next resort is to sell the body itself and this tends to fall upon

women and particularly women of color so selling the body as a commodity has become a booming industry, especially now that many across the globe are facing poverty due to the pandemic. So, yeah, I also want to just reiterate that this is the classical communist line to oppose sex trade and sexual exploitation. Yeah, Alexander Collentai talked about it. Marx, Angles talked about it. Sancarra talked about it. It's pretty uncontroversial historically on the communist left.

to take this position and that sort of adds another layer of irony why this is such a controversial topic on the on the left today and your point about labor power selling your labor power for selling your body I think is really important because that's often obscured and muddied in these discussions and generally liberal feminism you know suffers from so many of the core problems of liberalism more broadly it just manifests specifically in certain ways that need to be critiqued from a principled Marxist perspective. Before we move on and specifically thinking about this empowering rhetoric, because in the last 10 years, I think it's really picked up this idea that the phrase sex work is work is present, but then it even takes

it a step further by saying that sex work is somehow uniquely empowering. And I was wondering if either of you had a little bit more to say on that rhetoric and maybe even how it's connected up more broadly with feminist choice theory? Well, you know, the first thing I want to say is that I think in many ways they are realizing that the empowerment narrative is so bankrupt. And so many of them are moving away from it, although they are still relying on the basic tenets of liberal arguments, which is focusing on choice and not on context, being a historical and just really covering up what's actually happening in the industry.

But, you know, one thing that I wanted to point out in the previous section as well is that this rhetoric is not coming from nowhere, right? It's not simply thought up in a few individuals' minds and sort of caught on, but this rhetoric was actually strategically developed by the very people that benefit and profit from the industry. So when you look at the origin point for these arguments, well, one, they all originated in the imperial core. But two, they also originated by pimps, by capitalists. For example, one of the very first organizations to ever call for the decriminalization of pimping and sex buying was the organization, Coyote.

What most people do not know is that they were funded themselves by the sex industry. They had funding from Playboy. Then you look at how it caught on in Europe. And one of a very well-known pimp in Europe named Douglas Fox also funded and started his own organization that was a supposed sex worker group, but it wasn't. It was a front. And so what you see is that the actual capitalists benefiting from the industry have propagated the masses with these liberal empowerment, individual arguments.

And then they themselves step back and are hidden while the rest of us fight with each other. And so I just think it's really important to emphasize that these arguments did not come out of nowhere, but they were propagated intentionally by the capitalists who profit from the, this market because it is in their best interest to expand the market at our expense. Yeah. A central point. Bridget, do you have anything to add to that before we move on? Yeah, I do. I feel that another worrying catchphrase that we hear a lot among the liberal feminist left is the phrase that, you know, sex work is a job like any other job. And I would counter that by saying, yes, you are, you are, you know, exerting labor. It is an extremely

difficult trade to be in. It is extremely painful. It's not easy work by any means as it is often portrayed. But I want to point out that the level of sexual exploitation and sexual abuse that goes on within this trade cannot be compared to any other sector of any industry. The amount of robbery, rape, murder, trafficking, and abuse that goes on within this industry cannot be compared to any other job. So I just also wanted to mention that because it's kind of a sentiment that gets thrown around a lot in this area of discourse. Yeah, absolutely. And that leads well into this next question, which might be among the most difficult questions in this outline,

and although both of you are very open and honest about this, but now that we do have some definitions on the table, could each of you please tell us about your experiences in the sex trade? I think it's important to frame it and to show that this comes from actual experience and not mere intellectualizing or taking abstract positions. Sure. So on a personal know, and I don't normally talk about this, but for the sake of this interview, I will.

I entered the sex trade at 21, and in my case, I had moved across the country with a man that I was dating, and he promised to get me a job out West. He ended up being extremely abusive physically and mentally and even financially, because he ended up withholding all of my earnings for me while we were living together. And at some point, the abuse got so bad that one day I escaped in secret on a bus while he wasn't home with nothing but a suitcase and like $200 in cash that I had saved up basically in my pockets. And so I took the bus to another state and ended up in a few cities over where I resorted to living out of a hostel. and because I had so little money to my name and needed to be able to buy food and pay for the hostel for however many days I needed to

until I could find actual housing somehow. I needed money immediately and so I turned to the sex trade in order to survive. So at that point I would have done anything to be able to eat but I also did not find it to be something that was empowering to me

that I was engaging in. And eventually I was able to get out of the trade, but needless to say, I experienced abuse within the trade, and there are long-term consequences that have come out of my involvement. And in hindsight now, this is nearly 10 years later, it's kind of sad to me that in order to escape the abuse of a man,

that I needed to expose myself to more abuse by a large, archer number of men. But I also want to make it clear again that I have no shame towards that period of my life. And the reason why I talk on the subject of the sex of the sex trade is not to exact revenge of any sort. But my analysis is rather based in materialist analysis and my arguments should stand on their own. So even though I do have like intimate experience in how the sex trade operates, my analysis is more based on a Marxist, materialist analysis of the trade itself. Yeah. And, you know, for me, I, you know, before I was in the sex trade, I was very much sex workers work. I 100% support it because I really wanted to support people that I thought

were, you know, getting stigma and shame for absolutely no reason. I thought that it was a job. I thought that it was a job like any other. Additionally, as a transgender woman in the trans community, prostitution is very glorified and glamorized. And in many ways, it's looked up to. And it's sort of considered to be almost like a milestone or, you know, a pathway that we all go through, at least those of us who are proletarian, right? And so what I found is that I lost my job because I was transitioning and then I lost my housing and the only thing that I could do at that moment was the sex trait and what ended up happening is that at first it was somewhat okay I mean it was not something I ever really enjoyed but it was something that initially I was

like okay maybe you know this could work fast forward some time I had been raped several times, sexually assaulted several times. Men had tried to rob me several times. I've had several friends die in the sex trade alone in their hotel room or motel room. And I quickly realized that my idea of the sex trade before being in it was completely different and the exact opposite it as to what I experienced and every girl I know, I knew and still know that was in it. And at one point, after experiencing the most brutal rape that I had ever experienced in the sex trade, my body completely shut off. At the time, my mom was thought to have had cancer and she was getting a lot of testing and going to the doctors. And I felt like I couldn't leave it

because I still had to help her. I had to help her get to the doctors, pay for her medication, et cetera. But because there is no right to exit, I could not leave. There was nothing else that I could do. Eventually, I just couldn't do it anymore, and I ended up going homeless

and living in a shelter and living in someone's car and having no place to go. And it took me years, I think around two and a half years to finally be able to come out and say something does not feel right about the mainstream liberal discourse. I saw the DSA resolution that endorsed the decriminalization of pimps and sex buyers and said sex workers work. And it did not at all mention the exploitative nature of the industry, the violence that loads. of us inside of it will face the violence that nationally oppressed women will face under imperialism and I said something needs to change about this right like somebody needs to make some

sort of intervention and so at that point I started studying what is the reality of the sex trade for the majority of women in it and I realized that my experience was not at all uncommon most of us are coerced into it for one reason or another there's a reason reason why the people with the most freedom in society, the rich, are not doing this. And those of us with the least freedom, poor people, homeless people, women of color, indigenous women, trans women, those of us cut out from the formal economy, there's a reason why we're the ones doing this and were the ones taking the brunt of it. And at that point, I had reached out to the organization I'm in, which is an anti-imperialist, transnational feminist

organization, and I had asked them if they could support me in writing out my own experiences and sharing it, and they did. And from that, I've been connected with women, trans women, all over the world, including, you know, oppressed nations who also see the sex trade the same way I do as exploitation and as something that we as a society need to leave in our past and move beyond. And that's sort of how I came to where I am. now yeah well you know first of all i'm so sorry from the bottom of my heart to both of you for the shit that you went through and um specifically last yesterday i was reading a socialist feminist feminist feminist and transgender analysis of quote unquote sex work by u.s baronsa and um openly wept at

some of the some of the abuse that you faced and even later in my car driving around alone like tears would flood out of my out of my eyes thinking about what you had to go through so um it's i know it's not much but i from the bottom of my heart it's it's heartbreaking to hear about this stuff. And in both of your cases, it's very obviously clear that economic coercion is at the root of both of your experiences. And it windled down the quote-unquote choices that you have. And so, you know, any analysis or attempt to talk about this stuff that doesn't take into account the role that economic coercion plays, I think is always going to be a terrible analysis from the get-go.

I also want to echo that and emphasize that our experiences are not the exception and are not in any way novel, but are rather the norm across the globe. And there's a quote by Catherine McKinnon that I find is really useful on this subject. And she says, when material conditions preclude 99% of your options, it is not materially meaningful to call the one remaining percent of which you are doing choice. So, you know, we also have to assess the material conditions in which people are entering the trade. And more times, like rather than not, it is due to economic coercion and abject poverty. And, you know, in other contexts, people on the left have no problem conceptualizing this.

Like when you hear a right winger say, well, if you don't like your job, just quit and get a better one. Like, we all roll our eyes and scoff or, you know, you don't like McDonald's, go work at Burger King. Like, we're all like, yeah, but you're not taking into account the insanely limited choices that I have. It all makes sense on that level, but for some reason, when we move over to discussion of the sex trade, those waters get very muddy, and, you know, people that would take an obvious position in other contexts seem to lose their analysis when it comes to this. But let's go, let's move forward, and let's actually shift into the history of the sex trade. trade and that article I just mentioned by Esperanza, a socialist feminist and transgender analysis of sex work, you say, quote, by claiming that prostitution has existed in virtually every

society, one intentionally misleads people into an idealist understanding of history that is both a historical and attempts to present prostitution as natural, end quote. And in addition to that, as you said earlier, you often hear people echo the myth that prostitution is the oldest profession. So can both of you talk about the actual history of prostitution, how it arose, and why the idea that it existed in every society is a historical and idealist? Absolutely. So, you know, the first historical mention of prostitution was around 2400 BC in ancient Sumeria. And as you know, it was a society organized by chattel slavery and patriarchal property relations. Prostitution actually started by the ruling class of the time, enslaving mostly women and children.

The first slaves were majority women and children, and they would prostitute them out in and around the temples and collect the profit. It is directly linked to the regulation of women's sexuality, as well as to militarism, conquest, and debt slavery. A lot of us buy into this myth that the sex trade is the world's oldest profession, which not only is it historically inaccurate, if you read Gerta Lerner, the creation of patriarchy, she founded the discipline of women's history. She completely debunks that myth using conclusive evidence, historical and anthropological evidence, but it's also an imperialist and colonial lie. The phrase, prostitution is the world's oldest profession, was created and popularized by a man named Rudyard Kipling, who was a poet who glorified imperialism. If you have heard of the concept, the white man's burden, where it is the white man's job and his burden to go into these, you know, communities of savages and oppressed nations and civilized.

them, Rudyard Kipling also created that concept. He also wrote poems and stories justifying the conquest and colonization of the Philippines. So this is a man who is in every sense of the word, a class enemy, an enemy to our class, an enemy to all people seeking national liberation and liberation from class oppression. And yet we are going to allow this man to revised history and allow a myth that he created to seep so deep into our culture and our psyche, I say absolutely not, right? So we have to bust through that myth. That is, you know, not at all correct. Additionally, a lot of people try to paint it as if it existed in every indigenous society. And I see this very similar to the tactic of neocolonialism, where you have

imperialism really pushing things on oppressed nations, but then, you know, sort of saying, oh, this arose within that nation itself. This nation wanted this. For example, you see this in India with some of the IMF policies, right, trying to pretend like it was sort of originated within India itself. The reality is, is that it depends on what indigenous society you're talking about, ones that already had strong class structure, class antagonism, they often did have prostitution. And in a sense, that is why we do not simply want to end colonialism. We want to end class society itself, right? But at the same time, indigenous societies that were more communal, that did not have strong class structures, indigenous societies that also were not sexually

restrictive and that we're more free sexually, you do not see prostitution there. And you definitely don't see it on the level that it is today as a globalized and organized market. Absolutely, Bridget, anything to add to that? Sure, yeah. I also want to emphasize that this myth that prostitution is the oldest profession is honestly absolutely ridiculous and really reflects the attitudes that the general populace has towards women today, but I want to point out that the oldest professions are really things such as

midwifery, pottery, toolmaking, building, medicine craft, weaving, etc. There are countless other examples I can give that fit the description of the oldest profession much better than that of prostitution. And as Esperanza said, it developed relatively, recently as a phenomenon existing in the human species and was developed basically alongside the development of the concept of private property itself, right? Women being commodified for their reproductive capacity and being subjected to things such as forced marriage and prostitution. And for this reason, we consider prostitution.

to be the oldest oppression rather than the oldest profession. But I also want to point out on a more positive note that in knowing this, in knowing that women's subjugation and things like prostitution are not an inherent fixture of human society, but more so arises out of class conflict, we can know, and we can know that it doesn't always have to be this way in the future. And in knowing that it has not always been this way, but as more a recent development in the grand scale of the existence of our species, we can hope to change our conditions for a better future

where these institutions no longer exist. Yeah, well said on both of your parts. And like so many things in our society, people will vomit things out, you know, that seem to them as common sense. And when that happens, you're almost always regurgitating some form of passively absorbed ideological conditioning. And it's no different when people say things like virtually every society has had prostitution or that prostitution is the oldest profession. You'll hear this come out of the faces of people all the time. But they themselves have never done any serious research on it whatsoever.

have no idea where they even first picked up the claim. And so in any case when somebody or even yourself is saying something that is like that, you can almost guarantee that you've been ideologically conditioned to make that assumption and to not question it. And part of being a Marxist for sure, just an intellectual or a thinker whatsoever is being able to bring a critical eye to things that in our broader society are just assumed to be true by the majority of people. and this is one of an infinite amount of examples of that so it's worth thinking about that as well

and moving on you know a crucial part of this discussion is also and we've touched on this a little bit or at least alluded to it is an analysis of the power dynamics and the contradictions that exist here between the buyer and the seller between genders races and classes between colonizers and the colonize specifically when we talk about sex tourism for example so can you both talk about some of these fundamental contradictions and sort of how they operate in the sex trade globally? Sure. So there are many contradictory forces at play within the sex trade. And some of the main power dynamics are between the purchased and the purchaser. So one person has the money that the other person needs. And this will ultimately lead to a push and pull dynamic

where the purchased wishes to do the least amount for the most amount of money possible. And the purchaser is seeking to get the most out of as little money as possible, right? So there's a push and pull dynamic of exchange here. It tends to be the purchaser who wins out because the purchased will almost always have pressure to accept harsher conditions in order to serve. survive. Like, right, they need the money. And so a lot of times people do whatever it takes to access it, to buy food, have a place to live. And there are also other dynamics involved that are obviously sex-based. So it's overwhelmingly men buying the sex of women and children. It's often white men who are purchasing women and children of color.

There are many, many dynamics within the trade that cannot go ignored. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, Bridget, I think that you are spot on in identifying that the woman needs the money more than the man needs his orgasm. And that is power that he holds over her. And so I think that something that's really important is that as Marxists, we understand that, you know, commodity exchange, buying things, et cetera. They mask social relationships, right? That's one of the first things that we learn in Marx's capital. And in the same way, right, this exchange is also masking a social relationship, specifically a power struggle, right?

Like Bridget said, the woman always wants to do less for more, whereas the man, the buyer always wants to get more for less. And so that is a power struggle that plays out. Now, the difference within prostitution is that that power struggle is playing itself out over your body and literally inside of your body. And this is an analysis I came to after reflecting on my own experience. and the experiences of others that I know because it is always a power struggle. The client will literally be inside of you and trying to push your boundaries

so that he could get more and you are trying to do less. And so when that power struggle plays out over and inside of your body, your boundaries are going to be violated and sexual violence is always going to be part of the equation. And so a lot of people try to, to paint the main contradiction as between the people in the sex trade and the police or between

migrant people in the sex trade and ice. And although those are contradictions and they are antagonistic contradictions, the primary contradiction is between the buyers and the bot, right? And I think that that is something that we need to understand is also always antagonistic. Additionally, there is that contradiction of imperialism, as you noted, imperialist nations have historically attempted to turn the third world and the global south into brothels, which is why when you have national liberation revolutions that take power, for example, in Cuba, the first thing that they do is they kick out the imperialist sex pests and they reclaim their cities, not as brothels for imperialist men, but as places for their own. You know, I

also think that we need to look at, you know, when we say these contradictions exist, well, how do we resolve them, right? We do not believe that the sex trade can ever be non-exploitative. And the reason why is because at its core, it commodifies the bodies of proletarian women. And it's based on this feudal, you know, right of the first night in which men of the upper classes can use their money, which is power in our society in order to access the bodies of people that they make vulnerable, that they put into poverty. And so that's why we call for abolition. I also want to emphasize that it is an extremely racialized industry with black, indigenous, and Asian women and children being grossly overrepresented,

within the trade, which in itself is honestly a glaring symbol of white supremacist structure within the industry. We have, we know that people who are sex trafficked, 70% of them are Asian women. We know that in the United States, nearly 60% of all juvenile prostitution arrests are black children, while 40% of sex trafficking victims are black women. We also know that traffickers have been noted as saying that they believe that trafficking black women would land them less prison time than trafficking white women. We also know that many indigenous cultures around the globe did not have the institution of sex trade as part of their cultures until colonial forces came in and confined the indigenous women into sexual slavery as a tool of

colonization. And we see this, especially in Canada, where indigenous people make up 4% of the population, 40% of the people who are victims of sex trafficking are indigenous people. So it's also true that the subject of missing and murdered indigenous women cannot be separated from the role that the sex trade plays in their suffering. absolutely and to both of your points the the empowerment rhetoric obscures all of this right it papers over all of these disparities and actual power struggles as you both so so wonderfully articulated and so that's another reason to be hyper suspicious of that sort of rhetoric when it comes to this and esperanza's point about cuba under the batista regime is really interesting as well because that was a huge part of the the revolution of of you know why American bourgeois, you know, members of the bourgeoisie wanted to keep Cuba as it was under Batista because it was basically a casino and a brothel and a vacation spot for members of the ruling class in the U.S. And the Cuban Revolution overthrew all that, kicked all the parasites out of their country and said no more.

And so that was a huge element, just one among many, of course, but a large one in that revolution. and the impression I get with sex tourism as well is that it's deeply tied in with not only like racialized misogyny but also like pedophilia and I haven't done a lot of research on this but when it comes to sex tourism broadly, am I correct in drawing a line between that and the predation of children in particular? You are absolutely correct in making that connection and we also need to go deeper and understand how did the sex tourism industry develop in the global south? Well, one, it was developed because of militarism, military intervention from imperialist nations like the U.S.

who set up military brothels around military bases when they would invade nations, where they would literally force women into prostitution to serve these soldiers. And then when, you know, they eventually left, or the majority of troops left, that created the infrastructure for the sex tourism industry that we see today. Couple that with the IMF and the World Bank, whose policies, for example, their loan interest policies and their cuts to social welfare, pushed large swaths of women into the sex trade. And not only that, but also pushed large swaths of families to literally sell their children into the sex trade or into some form of commercial sexual exploitation. And the imperialist powers, along with the IMF and the World Bank, keep these nations in really dire poverty

while maintaining their sex tourism industry. And now you see what we have today, which is where all of these industries, the tourism industry, the hotel industry, the bar, the saunas, et cetera, they all collude in order to basically profit off of the sexual exploitation of women and children. And I think that this is what happens. This is the natural result when you allow certain people, poor people, nationally oppressed people, you see them as commodities. And that's why we need to get at the root and ensure that nobody is ever seen or pushed into being a commodity, especially not women and children. Yeah, incredibly important point and well articulated.

We mentioned this earlier, but I was really wondering how the COVID pandemic has affected the industry and the sort of economic pressures that it released on societies all over the world. Can either of you talk about the COVID pandemic and its relationship to this? Sure. So the statistic that I gave earlier of 41 million people being estimated to be operating within the sex trade globally. That statistic is from 2012. So we aren't exactly sure how many people are working in prostitution today, but we can assume that that number has largely expanded in the last eight years or so,

eight, nine years. But especially considering the pandemic, how that is played out and people are losing their jobs, people need to support their family. this has caused a new extreme expansion of the sex trade itself with millions of people attempting to scrape by and survive. We know that in the pandemic, the amount of sex buyers available has been greatly lessened because a lot of people, you know, don't want to spread the disease. This causes people in prostitution to have to accept working. conditions that they wouldn't otherwise accept because there's fewer sex buyers available for them to work for. This also causes people to be more likely to accept worse working conditions

in order to find any work at all. So including performing sex acts that they wouldn't normally agree to or involving themselves with people that they would otherwise consider to be dangerous. It also puts people of extreme risk of contracting diseases, such as COVID, because you're coming in such close contact with other people who also don't really care about your well-being at all. There's a much greater risk of contracting COVID-19 in general. And with so few exit programs available to people, this creates an even more dangerous condition for people within the sex trade. So COVID has only exacerbated existing conditions for people within the sex trade in general. You know, we see that there is absolutely a relation between the sex trade and economic crises. I mean, for example, women took the hardest hit in the U.S. during the COVID crisis and the recession.

And yet you also see this big boom in only fans and other sex markets in which women's bodies, are presented as a cure to men's alienation in capitalist society. And so, you know, there also needs to be something said about that. And even one of the biggest imperialist-sponsored foundations that funds the movement to expand the sex trade across the globe, they even released a report stating that women in the sex trade are now not able to negotiate condom use as well because of the economic crisis.

So you see that during these economic, crises, a large amount of women are pushed into the sex trade in order to survive, which then saturates the market and then pushes them to, like Bridget said, take more dangerous work for less money in order to survive. And just another way that we see, another reason to say that like the recruitment strategy of the sex trade is literally to prey on the most vulnerable segments of society. You see like the CEO of Onlyfans, Tim Stokely, for example, really pushing this narrative about only fans, like helping women, you know, make money, et cetera, which is really just using them to make money off of them when they're likely not going to make much money at all.

Yeah. Do you have any sense, before we move on to the next question, any sense of the class breakdown of like Johns in the U.S. or North America in particular? Like, you know, I can see people having like an idea that they're all just like well off businessmen or whatever. or do either of you have a sense of that class breakdown? Well, I mean, the reality is, is that they're not all bourgeois men or, you know, petty bourgeois men. I mean, there are so few studies on sex buyers because the focus has always been put on the women in the sex trade that it's very difficult to know. But I think that given the data and the information that we have, we can say that the majority of them are petty bourgeois or bourgeois men. but there are some proletarian men who also do this.

And I think that this is also a historical point, which is that if you read Sylvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch, you see how, you know, from the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the ruling class at the time would give proletarian men access to women, either through prostitution or rape, so that they could turn the class antagonism, into a sexual and gender antagonism. And it's really important for us to think, like,

in order for the bourgeoisie to have access to our bodies, they also need to allow proletarian men to access it too. So that way they can attempt to break class solidarity and build that sort of gender solidarity across class lines. And I think as communists, that's what we need to be fighting. Absolutely. Let's go ahead and move on to this next question. And this one is centered around poor dog.

And pornography in particular is highly normalized in our society, especially after the rise of the internet where it's accessible in a matter of seconds and anyone with a computer connection can get to it. And growing up, you know, every teenage, early 20-something boy that I knew sort of took it for granted and used it regularly. And the very idea that it was anything other than totally normal was anathema to all of us. And obviously my position has changed over the years. But can you both talk about pornography, the sort of role it plays in all of this, and how websites like Pornhub in particular profit from it? Sure. So I guess it's important to start by pointing out that I don't believe that there's anything inherently wrong with a picture of a nude body or people

recording themselves having sex. But as far as the topic of porn and its role in sex exploitation is concerned, there's a lot to unpack there and probably way more than we can even attempt to begin to unpack in this episode. But in short, porn is an industry that's also based upon sexism, racism, classism, among many other social injustices. And the porn industry itself, in many ways fuels the entire trade of sexual exploitation because it tends to normalize sexual abuse against women. So porn itself is film prostitution. And just like in prostitution, we have many people entering the porn industry due to economic coercion, right? There's a reason why the porn mecca is Los Angeles, where we have a bunch of people moving there to become

actors and it doesn't work out so they turn to the porn industry to you know basically have a means to survive and and they feel that they're you know still acting and the industry itself we still have people being sexually abused left and right um in a lot of pornography you will find on the internet on nearly any porn website there they are hosting actual videos of trafficking victims of rape victims um child victims etc and there's no real way to tell whether or not the content you're viewing is any of this because this information is not usually if ever at all provided by the people in the videos that you're viewing so the porn industry profits massively off of this type of exploitation and they rarely if ever do anything about taking down these videos from their

platforms. And it's largely the exploitation of women and teen girls being filmed and enjoyed for men's pleasure. And we do know that 88% of mainstream pornography contains images of sexual violence. And it's almost exclusively violence enacted against real women in these videos. So there's also the market dynamic of the porn companies under capitalism. So, you know, these companies have an incentive to compete with one another and create the most provocative and shocking content that they possibly can in order to gain people's attention and gain popularity and thus make more money. So you have these people creating more and more extreme content and enacting more and more extreme abuse upon the people in these videos

for the sake of profit alone. So the porn industry itself as it stands is a way to fuel the sex trade in general. Absolutely. And just to follow up on that, you know, it's really interesting how when we critique porn, we're told that we are swirths or something. Even, for example, actors in porn themselves. I witnessed this one woman, talk about how porn is so exploitative, and she got dogpiled online being called to swirth. And she literally had to tell them, I'm literally suffering from anal bleeding right now and internal problems

because I was pressured and nearly forced into doing anal scenes when I said, this is not what I want to do. But yet look at how, for example, Mind Geek, which is the world's largest porn conglomerate, maintaining a monopoly over the industry, received over $460 million in revenue in 2018. Compare that to, for example, how a female performer in order to make only $30,000 a year would on average have to star in around 100 films. there is a deep, deep problem with that. And I think at its base, it's that when you put a profit motive behind sex, people's well-being and safety is never going to be prioritized. And it is always going to be sacrificed for profit.

Yeah, exactly right. And so much of the content on porn sites, as you're talking about this shocking content is deeply racist. It's incredibly violent. and now with it being so normalized and easy to access in society, you know, children, teenagers growing up, sometimes their first, you know, fundamental sexual experiences or exposure to sex is funneled through these pornography websites,

which at the very least radically skew the realities of sex and relationship and romanticism, but in extreme cases, and I think more and more, it glorifies and reifies and normalizes hyper-violence, as part and parcel of sexual activity, not to mention the racist tropes that are often presented in pornography. So it's a socially, you know, important issue. And it can't just be dismissed with a handwave on some libertine premise that, you know, porn is okay in all circumstances, because the actual industry behind it is deeply corrupt and has, as you said, this profit

motive ahead and beyond and above any commitment to safety or well-being or social health in any sense of the term. So those are all important things to keep in mind. Exactly. All right. So this closing section, four more questions, and just as a way to wrap up and to zoom out and take a final perspective on this discussion, what does the struggle for socialism and for women's emancipation offer as a vision for how we can overcome? all that we've talked about today, and I know we've alluded to this throughout the conversation, but maybe touching on it one last time, why is anti-imperialism an essential aspect of this overall

struggle? Sure. So, although I am a sex trade abolitionist, both of us would consider ourselves to be sex trade abolitionists, we believe that the only path to women's emancipation and the emancipation of all people is the construction of socialism. So like women's emancipation is dependent upon communism and building communism, communism itself is also dependent upon women's emancipation and the two cannot ever be separated. So the fight against imperialism and colonialism too is tied to the fight against the sex trade itself. Where men plunder the land, they also plunder the women too. And it's up to us to oppose this at every turn. And while we are still in the process of building socialism,

while we are living under a capitalist class-based society, it's also crucial for us to promote the decriminalization of people within the sex trade, while also not letting their exploiters go free, the pimps, Johns, and traffickers. So when people in the sex trade are decriminalized, This makes it so that they will not be sent to prison for being arrested for prostitution, right? Arrests just will not happen. We know that every time a person is arrested for prostitution, this goes on their record, which makes it nearly impossible to find other modes of work or find places to live and creates concrete barriers for people to be able to have the right to exit. We also want to make sure that we do not protect pimps, johns, and traffickers in the process, the people who are exploiting people around the globe.

We also want to promote the creation and existence of exit programs. So these are social services such as housing, education, medical programs, and other forms of work for people within the sex trade. because we know that up to 89% of people who are working in prostitution, their number one wish is to be able to exit the trade, but they have no means to be able to exit. So while we're still living under class society, we have to ensure that we are pushing for the creation, for resources and protections for people within the sex trade.

As Brons, anything to add to that? Yeah, I think Bridgett beautifully captured it, As she said, there's two classes in the sex trade, the exploited class and the exploiting class. And we need to protect the exploited, decriminalize the exploited, but not expand the rights of the exploiting class, which is what they are currently trying to do. We cannot also just simply fight commercial sexual exploitation without also fighting capitalism, imperialism, and in nations where it still exists, feudalism. We have to make anti-imperialism a central part of our struggle because for the majority of the globe, the sex trade is there because of imperialism. And the very least that we could do in the imperial core is not to buy into narratives that were created and propagated by imperialists. And so educating ourselves is the first thing that we need to do, but also challenging those imperialist narratives and myths at every step is the second.

and the very least. Absolutely. And here's another question to try to give people a way forward. What can men do, or maybe and more importantly, stop doing to assist in the liberation of women on this front in particular? Firstly, I want to encourage all of our comrades to study feminist texts and study feminist theory, but especially our male comrades. I find that this is a portion of theory that a lot of men tend to exclude from their field of study. And I want to encourage people to read Friedrich Engels, his work, The Origin of Family,

Private Property and the State, read the work of our comrade Gertel Lerner, who is a feminist historian and Marxist. Her book that is her magnum opus is called The Creation of Patriarchy, where she goes over the entire history of the creation of class society and patriarchy. And she's really building off of the theorizing of Frederick Engels, but in an updated 20th century context, as well as the work of people like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon and Thomas Sankara to understand the intricacies of patriarchy and capitalism. So I think we need to work on integrating feminist theory into our praxis and create organizing spaces in which women can feel safe and like they aren't being preyed upon or intellectually subverted by our male comrades.

And I also just want to say that just because you call yourself a Marxist doesn't mean you have the correct analysis on the woman's question. So I want to really encourage people to study this and see if a liberal ideology has impacted your worldview and your personal ideology on the line of women's emancipation. Definitely. Esperanza? Yeah, just going off of that, right, I think in the same way that everyone needs to be anti-racist, needs to be anti-imperialist, every, you know, communist also needs to be a feminist. Obviously, not a bourgeois or a petty bourgeois feminist, class collaboration feminist, but a proletarian feminist.

Men need to not avoid the issue because they think that it's not their issue. And additionally, they need to uproot the liberalism that makes them feel like they cannot actually speak out on touchy subjects like sexual exploitation of women, children, trans people, et cetera. I think that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to do as an individual. and so it is very important to get organized. Whether you join a communist organization, whether you join a mass organization, or whether you create a small study group among you and some of your close friends and comrades,

you cannot put the woman question last. It has to be first. When Kolontai says the woman's question is not separate from the general social question, that doesn't mean that we ignore it because we've already addressed it. it means that you do not understand the general social question unless you also understand the woman's question. And so this needs to be put first, not least because patriarchy and

patriarchal ideas unravel revolutionary organizations. And so if you do not deal with it at first, then it will deal with you. I agree with every single syllable. Both of you uttered right there, and we see time and time and time again leftist organizations, leftist formations, be rotted out from the inside by members of those orgs that don't take this stuff seriously,

don't put it front and setter, and specifically men who think that they can just gloss over this aspect of revolutionary politics, as if it takes a back seat to other concerns when it's inexorably intertwined with everything that we ostensibly care about. If you could leave our listeners

with one major lesson, or one major takeaway from our discussion today as widespread and as in-depth as it's been, what would it be before we wrap up here? Yeah, so I think the first thing is that we obviously need to counter this liberal and imperialist trend of dressing up the exploitation and oppression and violence against women as empowerment and as a choice. But like I said earlier, that is nearly impossible to do as an individual. And so I think the biggest takeaway that I could say is that, yes, you have to study proletarian feminist texts. You have to study texts that directly counter the patriarchal and imperialist narratives that are justifying and emboldening violence against women and sexual exploitation.

But at the same time, we have to do that. by getting organized. And so I think that we really need to push all of our organizations, all of our collectives, all of our groups to adopt a proletarian feminist line that provides a real, clear and direct answer to the women's question that does not increase the stigma against women like Bridget and myself who have been in the sex trade, but also that does not work for the interests of the people that exploit us. so that it does not work for the interests of the pimps, the Johns, the capitalists, or the imperialists.

And I think that is one of the most important things that we need to do at this time. Yeah, I completely agree with you, Esperanza, and I also want to emphasize that women, trans women, children, and our queer community are not commodities and should never be viewed as objects to be people. purchased and sold. And I also want to encourage people to trade like a more liberal Western analysis on the sex trade for a more internationalist analysis that includes all of the people of the global south in where they fit into the sex trade as an industry, as well as the people here in the United States or in the west, in the inner cities and all of the rural towns. we need to include the people whose voices we don't hear, the people who don't have internet connection

to tell us their stories. We have to include them in our analysis and give a really fair immaterialist analysis on the sex trade. So that's basically my final thoughts. Yeah, well said, and thank you both so much for coming on this show, having this discussion with me. You are both women that I genuinely admire, I learn from, and I honestly look up to. And it's an honor and a pleasure to have you on this show to teach me and my audience this crucial, crucial topic. Before I let you go, can you please let our listeners know where they can find you, your podcast, and your writings online. Sure, you can find me on the probably canceled podcast, which again is a new revolutionary feminist podcast that's dedicated to upload. lifting the voices of proletarian women and also combating these liberal feminist lines.

So we talk about things such as the sex trade, but it's a much more broad conversation in general there. You can also find me on Twitter at Comrade Bridget. And on Instagram, I have the same handle there. So come and join the discourse. Yeah. And for me, you can find me on Twitter at End Class Society, as well as on medium proletarian feminist dot medium dot com yep and i will link to all of that in the show notes so

people can go and support your work on both fronts very easily and another thing that i did notice um i love the probably canceled a podcast i've been listening to it a lot lately and just like stuff that we've faced there is this backlash of people that disagree with you that don't even listen to the podcast that go and give you negative reviews so it's like a bunch of five-star reviews and then a bunch of one-star reviews with no, you know, two, three, or fours in there. And that's happened to me when I've been doxed in the past or there's like right-wingers that discover the show. They'll try to organize a mass downvoting and down-reviewing of the podcast.

So anybody listening to this, definitely go give a five-star review to probably cancel and check it out if you haven't already. It's important. And Esperanza, your writings are incredibly admirable and influential and inspiring. So thank you both for all the work you do. and you always have a home here on Rev Left. I'd love to have you both back on to talk about anything and everything that you're interested in because I really enjoy learning from you and talking with you.

Well, thank you so much, Brett, and thank you so much, Esperanza. It's been great. Yeah, thank you both and solidarity.