Finn Mackay, the founder of the London Feminist Network, is a prominent activist for women’s rights, who was also responsible for the revival of Reclaim the Night in London. We speak with Finn about prostitution and the commodification of sex.

Do you think that prostitution is something we should unilaterally condemn?

I think the global, multi-billion dollar sex industry is something that we should condemn, and we can do that without being against the individuals who find themselves struggling to earn a living within that industry. I support the Nordic approach – which many other countries are looking into, including Scotland and France – which is to decriminalise everyone involved in the industry, and instead criminalise demand. In 1999, Sweden made it a criminal offence to buy and sell sexual access to the bodies of other people.

What is it that makes sex different from any other activity that we commodify through work?

Well the boundaries of the body and of bodily integrity are written into our laws, and we seem to understand them and find them commonplace everywhere, it seems, except for within this debate about prostitution and the prostitution industry.

So, for example, our law recognises a difference between being punched in the face, which would be common assault, and being raped. Those are two different things. If a man, for example, was to be anally raped, he would probably consider that quite a different crime to him being punched in the face, and indeed our law would recognise them as different. The rapist would receive a harsher sentence than the man who punched him in the face, because it’s breached bodily integrity and the boundaries of one’s own body and control over one’s own body. So we do understand the two things as separate.

Do you think that the majority of women in the sex trade are in some sense coerced into it either by society as a whole or by their circumstances, or do you think that it’s a personal choice they’re making that they still shouldn’t be allowed to take?

I think most people working in the prostitution industry, men and women, are there because they have found themselves within a limited set of options. They find themselves, not in circumstances of their own choosing, with limited options, and out of those limited options, survival sex for money becomes a viable option.

Obviously not every single person in the prostitution industry is being coerced in the sense we would understand. I’m sure not all of them have drug problems, not all of them have violent pimps, not all of them suffer from homelessness. But around the world people in the sex industry do tend to be marginalised in lots of ways.

That doesn’t mean every individual finds themselves in those circumstances, but it does mean we shouldn’t sell down the river the vast majority for whom that is the case, and pretend that people are making a glamorous, valid career choice to enter the sex industry when I just do not believe that is the reality. The research does not bear that out to be the reality for the majority of the people in the world.

Is breach of bodily integrity the criterion for prostitution being socially unacceptable? If someone engages in sex acts that don’t involve this breach, is that the same as doing any other vaguely sexualised job, such as modelling?