Slutdom by Dr Hilary Caldwell

Author:Dr Hilary Caldwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UQP
Published: 2024-05-15T05:34:54+00:00

SWERFs and TERFs

Between the 1960s and 1990s, feminism was a powerful source of social change that did much to improve the lives of women today. Women now expect equal pay, access to parental leave, childcare, and most of us believe that women and men should be equal. But back then, feminists were divided on sexual issues, with some believing that sex-positivity – and more specifically, the sex industry – was serving men’s desires. These (mainly) women were sex work abolitionist campaigners, known as Sex Work Exclusionary Radical Feminists (SWERFs). SWERFs want to end all commercial sex, because they believe gender power imbalances in the sex industry contribute to men’s dominance over women. Some SWERFs even say that ‘voluntary’ sex workers make the world unsafe for all women because they allow men to dominate them. They say I am ‘selling my body’. Seeing sex work as being only about bodies is objectifying and offensive. SWERFs promote fear that clients are paying to take control of the bodies of sex workers.

Our sexual culture has changed in the last thirty to forty years, and so has our understanding about power dynamics and gender. During the time that ‘radical’ feminism was popular, women didn’t have the same level of effective agency to consent to sex or to concentrate on their own pleasure in settings where men dominated them. Before the #MeToo movement, men who harassed and assaulted women were unlikely to be called out or held to account. Women still need to be mindful of danger when considering sexual activity, but the balance of rape culture has started to shift in Australia. Women’s pleasure in sex has also been ‘mainstreamed’ and given more emphasis in public and in private. We now have a deeper, or more nuanced, understanding of patriarchy and have grown out of simplistic solutions based on ideology rather than evidence.

Sex work opponents, who speak loudly in the media, say ‘all’ paid sexual services are ‘rape’23 and violence.24 They fetishise shocking examples and frequently speak of bleeding anuses and bruised vaginas. Conflating such extreme descriptions of sexual violence with all sex work, when they are so far removed from what people who buy or sell sexual services experience, can make those people reluctant to identify as sex workers or clients.

This was a problem I had when I first started as a sex worker. I knew I was in the business of selling sex, but not like a ‘sex worker’, not like ‘those on TV’. This and other similar beliefs were the reason that when I first started sex working, I worked alone. My beliefs about who sex workers are denied me my whore family for a number of years. Well-meaning friends, with no experience in selling sexual services, would tell me how different I was from other workers. They were wrong. Every sex worker I know, including myself, does not fit the stereotypes our society throws around. I’ve heard many sex workers complain that their friends thought they were different from other

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