Read other letters about this article

• Thursday, December 4, 2008 10:25 AM

  @Alpha Female

  If a person thinks that women are selling their very souls when they sell sex, they are really saying that a woman’s sense of self is no deeper than her vaginal canal.

  Your post kinda brought to my mind the Vagina Monologues and the controversy surrounding it. I think you have a valid point. It always amuses me when I hear some feminists make broad-brush arguments that sex work (porn/stripping/prostitution) is inherently degrading, abusive, exploitative, and dehumanizing, because such arguments always contain an element of seeing sex itself in those negative terms, no matter how much effort is expended to mask that underlying puritanism. The related arguments that most or all women who work in the sex industry are being abused or exploited or objectified or dehumanized also rely on underlying assumptions that these women don't know what's best for themselves (but the radical feminists sure do!), and lack the adult agency, maturity, autonomy, rationality, discipline, and self-esteem to be able to offer their full, informed consent to these activities, weigh the pros and cons, estimate risk, protect their self-interests, or recognize if they're being used or manipulated. They're really just widdle girls who can't think for themselves and make their own choices, and need the radfems (who have all those answers) to stage an intervention and save them from themselves, and of course the big, bad, mean, nasty MEN.

  Such arguments strike me as just as sexist and degrading toward women, in their own way, as anything you'd hear from a diehard male chauvinist pig.

  —Confucius Always Say Read Confucius Always Say's other letters
  Permalink
  Flag
  Click "Submit Flag" if you feel this post is inappropriate. Explain why below if you wish.

  Cancel