Photo taken from this article.
Where does campaigning around sex work in Lebanon go wrong?
Written by Sarah Kaddoura
My desire to write about sex work comes to fruition today after years of seeing campaigns/movements being made around it, but never truly about it. Since our work at the A project is centered around sexuality, gender, and sexual and reproductive rights, we dabble with most things related to sex, and its intersection with labour is no exception. From housework and child rearing to transactional sex and sex work, unwaged and waged labours of sex are not yet given their due when it comes to feminist organizing in Lebanon.
When it comes to sex work in Lebanon, the campaigning that claims to be in favour of sex workers conflates sex work and sex trafficking at its core. The terminology in this campaigning avoids “sex work”, replacing it with “trafficking” and “prostitution”, and replacing “sex workers” with “victims of trafficking” and “prostitutes”. Blurring the lines between a profession that one may choose violates the agency and consent of women and others, to be forced into the category of different forms of sexual slavery.
These distinctions are important for the sake of everyone involved. By erasing them, not only are they saying explicitly that women do not willingly exchange sexual services for money, but we are also not giving justice to women who are sex trafficked by lumping them in the same category with the former. Sex trafficking, as well as other forms of trafficking, deserves its own funding and efforts, and women and others who are caught in its cycle of abuse deserve to have their voices heard and rights protected without being brushed over or used for political agendas. Neither should their voices be used to silence those of sex workers, who end up being victimized in order to be “saved”, and whose stories don’t make it to the front of the campaigns.
This conflation between sex work and sex trafficking is not new or unique to Lebanon. It has been happening in many parts of the world, wherever funding pushes it to, and its impact has been nothing short of detrimental. Advocacy centered around the issue usually uses victimizing material for its campaigns, focused on depicting victims of prostitution in violent situations, and playing around our ideals of morality on sex and love.
An example of that melodramatization is Kafa’s 2014 anti-prostitution campaign, titled “Al Hawa Ma Byinshara”, literally translated to “love cannot be bought”, as a play on the term “Ba2i3at Al Hawa” or “the seller of love”, which is a term that has been used to describe prostitutes in Arabic. With imagery containing pictures of an arm being twisted and forced on the bed, with a retro 80s poster with neon lights, the depicted “prostitute” is forced into sex in settings that look like they were made for a loving (read: heterosexual, in love, non transactional) couple.
The message is clear, love cannot be bought, and when sex is had in return for money, it is no longer loving, and therefore no longer consensual. Love and sex are conflated again, after we’ve already blurred the lines between sex work and trafficking, and the viewer is left to associate that specific form of transactional sex with an attempt to commodify something as valuable and pristine as love. Unacceptable.
The problem with melodrama is that it ends up reducing the issue at hand to people, ignoring the bigger structural and political factors at hand1, and that’s exactly what this campaign and others similar to it do. This reduction happens in both pro-sex work discourses and abolitionist ones (meaning, ones seeking to abolish sex work). Both sides end up picking the stories that fit their narratives of what sex work is like. However, abolitionist ones almost never recognize the significance of consent in these exchanges, and place the responsibility of reproducing misogyny and patriarchy on the bodies of the women themselves instead of looking at it systemically.
Evidently, consent is butchered in this equation of conflation. Preaching feminism had become relatively easier in today’s digital era, particularly after many of its concepts and ideals have been simplified and made easily consumable, making it appeal to a vast array of people who would otherwise not be interested in relating to or investing in the movement. This is very fortunate, something that generations of feminists from the past could not have anticipated, but the downside of it is that it has diluted many sophisticated concepts, including consent. That is not to say that consent cannot be understood, or to dismiss the voices of people who know their consent was not considered under the guise of “ambiguity”. But consent is hard to understand without looking at context, and is even harder to understand when we boil it down to two options: an enthusiastic yes is a yes, and everything else is non-consensual.
This reductionist approach to consent is challenged when transaction of money or other material is done in exchange for sexual services. If we want to follow the logic of mainstream feminism and pretend that consent can only be considered when it is enthusiastic, when the person really wants to and feels like having sex, then we can assume that most of the sex that sex workers engage in is not consensual. A lot of sex workers, in porn, escorting, camming, and other sexual services, are not enthusiastic every time they are having sex, because it happens to be part of their job, the same way I am not enthusiastic about every task in my job, or enthusiastic every time I do it. But even though most of us are tied to our jobs because of wage labour, as long as these jobs are not related to sexual services, we will not find campaigns trying to free us from the shackles of our wages.
Demanding to complicate consent is not in attempt of vilifying the bad experiences women and other folk have with their consent being violated. Rather, it is a step towards recognizing the complexity of our sexual experiences, from the unwaged and personal encounters with sex, to the waged and transactional. It is to guarantee that we are not moving towards an understanding of sex that only views it in a binary of good and bad, but also sees the complexity of the human experience in between, which sex for money can exist at any point of.
A lot of critique can be said about sex positivity as a movement. One such is its invalidation of the feelings of negativity and/or fear one might associate with sex based on their experiences or beliefs, or the pressure it can put on individuals to engage in sexual experiences to gain certain levels of legitimacy within feminist circles (like openness to experiences, how often, who and how many people you sleep with…etc), alongside others. Moreover, A lot more can be said about an attitude that seeps into feminist organizing that refuses to discuss sex beyond violence. It is not sex positivity that is being resurrected here, no. We just want to pull the plug on the morality and hush that surrounds the s word when it comes to sex workers.
In looking at sex work as work, where consent is negotiated, and where the worker herself has a say in the decisions she makes about how to improve her situation, we can start to see the importance of mobilizing for the workers themselves. It is not in “saving” the worker or “saving” the profession that we can find the roots for feminist and worker solidarity, because our interest should not lie in either fulfilling our fantasies about saving or promoting an industry stained by capitalist commodification. It should lie in listening to the sex workers, and providing all the resources we can to better their conditions.
This demands that we hold each other accountable for the campaigns around their rights. We should ask ourselves: who is benefitting from the policies we are calling for? How do they reflect on the conditions of the sex workers? Are we targeting the migration policies that directly impact and facilitate sex trafficking? Are we adopting an intersectional leftist lens that makes a good distinction between labour rights and forced labor? And throughout this whole process, are we campaigning and using terminology that victimizes and stigmatizes the workers? Are we using language that demonizes the buyer of sexual services, and therefore again creates a binary of the “damsel in distress” and the “violent man”?
In Kafa’s campaign, and similar abolitionist campaigning around the world, the “prostitute” is infantilized and her decision making is skewed. She will do anything for money, that includes working in heinous conditions and tricking others in other non-work related events, because she is used to manipulation to survive. She is definitely not enjoying her situation, which she is coerced into directly or indirectly. She is constantly violated and abused, and her self esteem and worth are hindered low because of the circumstances. She is never in command of her options and work conditions, and her relation to sex is defined through exploitation and trickery.
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Similarly, the client is a man-whore or a deviant misoygynist, unable to control his desires. He uses the “prostitute” as a vessel to release his desires and wants in. He automatically views her as a lesser human and a lesser woman, doing with her unspeakable deeds that he would not do to his wife. He unleashes his violence on the “prostitute” so he can be a good, respectable man with the women in his life The only way to contain the violence of this client is by criminalizing his activity, even if it means he will seek those desires now in the dark - illegally and under the table.
This framing is hurtful to all parties included. This is not to say that clients cannot be violent, but that specifying the image of violence as such is very reductionist and unrealistic. The reasons people seek transactional sex can vary and may depend on how accessible sex to them is for different reasons. The fact is, looking at countries where the criminalization of the buyer is the de facto policy, the resulting demonization of clients of sex work means that “better” clients who sought the service in previously legal settings will no longer seek it. This group of clients will subsequently whittle down to clients who do not mind the deviance implied by the law. This leaves sex workers with less space to choose who to sleep with in order to make money, thus limiting their agency yet again
There’s also a lot of evidence on how these policies are reflected on the livelihood of the sex workers. Under abolotionist circumstances, they have lesser ability to negotiate prices and safe sex. They also have to do their business in hiding, meaning they cannot afford the protection and visibility they previously did, and cannot seek the protection of either the police or state2. So why are we still calling for policies that have been proven to be harmful to sex workers in many countries around the world?
In ending this essay, I would like to emphasize on how this entire intellectual debating of what works for the sex worker does not mean anything if it cannot materialize in bringing forth the voices of those impacted. Analyzing the structural oppression that leads to the commodification of sex and to forced sex labor is an important step in the process of improving the condition of women and people from different genders in the long run. Till then, we need to listen to those whose livelihood and well-being we claim to care about, and look really close at the violence we encourage through talking over them.