On Monday evening I sent out this tweet, quoting an article someone else had tweeted (CAUTION: loud & obnoxious autoplay video):
People who follow me are mostly used to my hyperbole, but I reckon I touched a nerve because a couple of male internet friends took exception, asking whether I was passing judgment on women who have sex with men because they like them, and questioning whether I thought there was anything wrong with doing things for free that one could charge for, out of principle or affection, such as pro bono legal work or favors for friends. I think my answer deserves a little expansion, and presentation in a more permanent medium than Twitter.
Like most people, I also do things for others I care about or whom I think it’s right to do things for, without asking for direct monetary compensation; however, I don’t deceive myself that those things aren’t labor. I sometimes do have sex with men without cash changing hands, but those guys (or their wives or girlfriends) pay me in other ways; currency is not the only form of payment. The problem isn’t when sexual labor is uncompensated by money, it’s when women buy into the male lie that sexual labor isn’t labor at all, because “mutuality”. Oh, please. I cook for people I love; I give them rides all over the place; I help them do manual labor; I wait on them when they’re sick. And nobody pretends those things aren’t work just because I’m doing them for people I care about; that’s why we have expressions like “labor of love”. But suddenly, when the work is sexual, everybody wants women to buy into the lie of “mutuality” even though I can sell my sexual labor & few men can; because so many men are willing to stick their dicks into anything warm (alive or not), dick is abundant and of low value. It is not in any way an equal or fair trade for pussy, no matter what many men like to believe. Expressed in economic terms, my sexual labor has value & his does not (except to other men); it’s a simple case of supply & demand. So I’ll give sex for “free” (where that means “no direct cash exchange”) if and only if the recipient (note that word, which designates the one who receives a thing of value) recognizes that what I give him is a gift, a precious thing of high value that I choose to bestow upon him for some reason of my own, and not a thing he’s “owed” or, even worse, a thing that his own low-value participation constitutes “payment in kind” for. In the case of a physical gift like jewelry, or a gift of labor like cooking a meal or helping a friend with some task, the recipient recognizes that the gift so conferred has value and expresses gratitude (unless he’s a semi-savage without proper manners). But in the case of sex, men want to pretend that what was given wasn’t a gift but a “mutual experience”, and a woman who disagrees and demands recognition of her value is stigmatized & punished with insults, the threat or infliction of violence and, in barbaric regimes like the United States, organized state persecution, police violence and ostracism. If that last weren’t true, this would be an academic discussion; however, it is true, and the recognition of the value of female sexual labor is not a mere intellectual exercise, but rather a matter of life and death for millions of women all over the world.
