Before “Trans Women are Women,” There Was “Sex Work is Work!”
When my oldest friend who would ultimately lead the cancel mob against me in 2020 first began to go funny, it was not exactly over genderwang, the issue over which our final conflict and my cancelation took place. Rather it was over an earlier but adjacent fad in the progressiverse, arguably the movement that functioned as the vanguard for genderwang.
An admirer and later collaborator with Billy Bragg, the anti-fascist turned anti-woman UK folk singer and activist, my friend returned from a stay in the mid-2010s, having had some solid face-time with Bragg and began, seemingly out of nowhere, banging on about how we really needed to “de-stigmatize sex work.”
Stigma, my friend explained, is why prostitutes are oppressed, well, that and borders. If we just had open borders, destigmatized and deregulated “sex work,” the oppression of “sex workers” would end. “But what about all the violent trafficking of women?” I asked. My friend explained that every sex trafficking bust we were reading about in the papers was a false flag operation by the cops and “big feminism.” No women were actually being violently trafficked or beaten by their pimps (this surprised me because he had been sure pimps were beating up prostitutes for the three decades preceding that conversation). It was all propaganda by organizations like ICE because the only violence sex workers were experiencing was due to the risks and violence they were exposed to because of the lack of an open borders policy.
Obviously, from this point forward, I became worried that my friend was experiencing something akin to cult indoctrination because he was developing a totalizing worldview. A totalizing worldview is one in which all evidence that would appear counter the worldview is read as evidence in support of it. The more sex trafficking busts that were reported in the paper, the greater the evidence of the scale and reach of the conspiracy against the sex workers.
Within a year, “sex work is work!” became the first of the “THIS is THAT!” ritually chanted group mantras the left took up. What was odd about this is that nobody was actually arguing that prostitution is not work. The beef that Vancouver Rape Relief and other feminists had with it was that it is work that should not be done because of its impacts on the individuals involved and on society as a whole.
Just as with “trans rights are human rights,” its primary function seemed to be an effort at strawmanning one’s opponents by vehemently insisting that something no one was arguing about was the centre of the actual controversy.
But I have, in recent months, come to realize that there is an additional sinister dimension to “sex work is work!” that had not previously occurred to me, making this mid-10s progressive fad not just the vanguard of “trans women are women,” but of the seismic shift in workplace social and legal norms associated with what is euphemistically called “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,” i.e. DEI.
Prostitution’s Unique Harms
I do not want to do want to normalize prostitution as a kind of work in this essay, nor do I want to suggest that there is some kind of “degrees of sex work” spectrum. But to understand more fully the profound and far reaching adverse effects of this discourse, it is necessary to break down what components prostitution contains.
The first and most egregious component is this: like surrogacy, it is about men renting the inside of people’s, overwhelmingly women’s, bodies. There is no form of physical labour outside of prostitution in which the insides of people’s bodies are rented out so that their “client” can do things in there. This form of extension of the market into the body through an orifice and the commodification and alienation of the inside of one’s body for a set period of time is profoundly disordering for the owner of that body and produces bad effects on society as a whole.
But there is a second aspect of prostitution, which is almost as important and strongly conditions the rent that can be charged for one’s insides: misrepresenting one’s thoughts and desires. The most successful prostitutes figure out what it is that their clients want them to claim to think and feel, to lie convincingly about what they desire, what they prefer, what they enjoy. One’s client has written a detailed script that he hasn’t exactly let you read but he’s going to be very angry if you don’t know your lines.
Indeed, the ability of “high end” prostitutes to have “escorting” work as part of their gig, to get breaks from the orifice rental industry and just be paid as a companion or display object for some of their working hours hinges strongly on falsifying one’s preferences based on cold reading and the ability not only to fake preferences but to express fake enthusiasm for those fake preferences.
Timur Kuran’s Study of Authoritarianism
I began thinking seriously about the importance of preference falsification in present-day progressive authoritarianism with the emergence of Timur Kuran as a major critic of the two main cultural arms of Wokeness, DEI and genderwang. Kuran is a social scientist I have long admired who began publishing on the effects of authoritarianism on the functioning of economies in the mid-1990s. For years, I assigned his articles to my students, back when both he and I would have been understood as members of the academic left.
Kuran’s interest has, since the 1990s, been the effects of authoritarianism on societies’ prosperity and development. In 1996, he authored a paper showing that, contrary to his initial hypothesis, Islam was not, itself, producing underdevelopment in the Middle East. Comparing societies across the Islamic Levant, Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf, Kuran found that the major factor producing making societies less developed, less efficient, less prosperous, was lack freedom of expression and democratic elections.
Hyper-secular Baathist Syria and Iraq were the worst countries. Kemalist Turkey and Islamist Iran scored surprisingly well primarily because, while freedom of speech was limited in these managed democracies, where political choice and debate were restricted, simply based on the fact that some, even if not all government policies could be criticized in the press and public square.
The reason for this was simple, Kuran argued: error checking and error correction. The more citizens can report that something about their country is not working and the more power they have to punish or replace those responsible for the failure, the more likely and the sooner mistakes will be noticed and once noticed, the more likely to be corrected.
And, Kuran explained in his subsequent books and articles, the suppression of negative feedback about the state and actors aligned with it is just the beginning. Bad policies are not merely shielded from criticism; authoritarian regimes encourage constant “preference falsification.”
“Preference falsification,” is where people lie about their beliefs, desires and opinions to curry favour with those who hold power over them and will compete for status or protection with other preference falsifiers to do the best job of expressing enthusiasm not just for terrible new things or disapproval of positive or beneficial things those in authority oppose. And preference falsification does not merely affect how people talk about ideas but even to their own experiences.
And in an environment of habitual preference falsification, people do not merely become habituated to lying; they develop forms of double consciousness in which they are increasingly uncertain of what their own opinions and feelings actually are from one moment to the next.
Kuran came out strongly against DEI programs in 2023 on social media because he argued that were turning white collar workplaces into environments of constant preference falsification. People are strongly encouraged to express opinions they do not hold on pain of firing or workplace discipline. These opinions range from beliefs about individual coworkers to workplace initiatives to events in the new to electoral politics. Furthermore, when DEI initiatives fail and do not produce the outcomes they purport to desire, no one can report this for fear that they will be seen as critical of DEI itself and face shaming, discipline and possible firing.
And there is also no guarantee that workplace speech policing policies will not follow a worker into settings outside work, to union meetings, to social events, to church, to political meetings. This is especially true if one is a member of a self-regulating profession like nursing, teaching or counselling psychology. Increasingly, the main challenge of staying in white collar work is not meeting the demands of one’s actual job but of engaging in constant defensive preference falsification.
The authoritarian preference falsification culture that is emanating from our workplaces no longer extends simply to issues with which Woke thinking is preoccupied. Our whole white collar culture is becoming like that of the 1970s USSR and Warsaw Pact: any expression of an opinion different from one’s superiors’ is understood to be increasingly transgressive, even as the pretensions, claims and pageantry of workplace equality and democracy escalate. Telling your boss he might be making a mistake is viewed as ever more improper and disloyal. Instead of insubordination being understood as defiance of a workplace decision, mere disagreement is insubordinate in a growing number of places.
I was able to observe this on a small scale in a former workplace. As the toughest grader in my department, the marks I awarded were sometimes appealed to my boss, the chair of the department in which I worked. When he chose to overrule the marks I gave, which was about 80% the time, he would let me know and I would say, “no problem. You’re the boss.” Because he was. I never minded being overruled; it was the cost of doing business and being in a clear and transparent hierarchy.
But as the years went by and DEI culture tightened its grip on my university’s culture, things changed. It became increasingly important for my boss to convince me that his mark was correct and mine was incorrect. He grew increasingly insistent that I change the mark to the one he wanted because I had realized my previous evaluation had been incorrect. And yet, at the same time, he was unwilling to actually have a dialogue about the new mark. I was being indirectly asked to feign having changed my mind and to have suddenly seen the error of my thinking and the correctness of his.
White Collar Work Grows More Sex Work-Adjacent
Thinking this through in light of some recent experiences in my circle, it occurs to me that “sex work is work,” has had an additional impact, additional meaning beyond the culture of misogyny it has helped to foster. The constant celebration of “sex work,” is also about normalizing the ways in which white collar work has become, shall we say, “sex work-adjacent.”
Sure, white collar workers do not deal with the physical violence and violation of prostitutes when they show up for work. Today’s white collar workers might be the most physically coddled people in human history, but their work does increasingly resemble that of prostitutes because their main workplace activity is preference falsification and the rate at which they are remunerated, their status with the work hierarchy, their ability to negotiate professional relationships is increasingly based on one main proficiency, preference falsification.
Programs like DEI can only function in a culture that does not merely normalize preference falsification but celebrates it, as we when celebrities make tearful speeches praising “sex workers,” as a class and publicly admiring the work they do.
