Do “Fallen Women” Need to Be Saved?
Sometimes you read an article that makes you go
“OMG! OMG! OMG! How simple it is!”
p.s., in case you aren’t another software engineer, simple is hard.
You may have noticed that here’s a trend growing called sex positive feminism that assumes that sex work is a valid and life affirming choice, not something sex workers need to be saved from.
It’s not mainstream feminism, and there’s a good deal of controversy around it, even (especially?) among radical feminists. Click on a few links in my blogroll and you can see the conversation.
Purtek nails this issue in a brilliant article.
one money quote among many:
Those who have responded to the question have already made the most important point here, which is that if sex work results from dire poverty and drug addiction, then talking constantly about eliminating sex work is really demonstrating an inability to understand the basics of causality.
We shouldn’t waste our time thinking about outliers when we’re thinking about recognizing people’s agency. Everybody’s got agency. Start there. Starting anywhere else is bouned to end up in the wrong place. Problems and dysfunction are individual matters, personal matters, that can be attacked at their roots (if we have the will to take it on) or one by one (if we don’t). And saying a class of people need to be saved takes power away, not just from that class, but from everybody. And it feeds the narrative that the motives of people on the left are suspect.
Why didn’t I know this?
Yes but we also shouldn’t go too far in the other direction and make the error of ascribing everything to individualism. Some “problems and dysfunctions” have their roots in societal inequities. It’s the myth of meritocracy, and the blindness of privilege, that allows so many Republican-leaning types to talk about pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps (of course assuming one has any boots to begin with) and talk about welfare as an “entitlement program.” As Elizabeth Edwards recently said, it’s not about handing people opportunities, but clearing the obstacles in their path so that they can pursue those opportunities themselves.
August 5th, 2008 at 11:56 am