The Boundaries of the Body

Why we must criminalise demand for sex work.

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?

Continue reading

Enjoy unlimited access to the world's leading thinkers.

Start by exploring our subscription options or joining our mailing list today.

Start Free Trial

Already a subscriber? Log in

Latest Releases
Join the conversation

Cameron Chelmsford 28 June 2021

I am highly inspired by the writing skills of Jennifer Bilek. So one must be advised to visit https://assignmentmasters.org/ to learn some new techniques of writing an essay. More power to this corporation for working on the unique products and procedures.

Gilbert Reid 2 3 July 2014

Criminalizing the customer merely drives the sex trade underground and therefore leaves sex workers without any protection and liable to the worst kinds of exploitation - including murder. The article above is gesture politics and ideology, a priori and self-righteous, and not really serving the interests of women or men. Perhaps it would be nice to have a world without prostitution (are dominatrixes who most often don't have sex with their clients prostitutes by the way?) and pornography (who defines the limits of pornography? Mennonites? The Taliban? The Pope? Cosmo Magazine?) but it will never happen - you might as well try to abolish desire. Invasive repressive totalitarian utopianism, as manifest in the above article, is as we know the enemy of the good society and of meaningful reform which is respectful of men and women and of people in general. Sweden is a fine place, but in many respects it is not a model of the 'good society'. In any case, men are not the only users of pornography, nor of professional sexual services.