This is a continuation of the previous post, although I'll have to depart from discussing Valenti here, because I'm simply not familiar enough with her work to know what her thinking is on sex work. (I do know, however, that she's well-known for discussing her own decision to marry in public. Oh noes! That stuff should be kept private. Like menstruation, sexual preference, and health care.)
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What I'm responding to is the by-now very familiar strawman characterization of third wave feminists and ('fourth wave') queer theorists as vapid cheerleaders who mindlessly promote and tout classically "immoral" sexual behaviors like pole-dancing as a path to female empowerment. Not only is this insultingly shallow and off-base, but it's also a little too convenient in a lot of ways; it helps to simplify a whole world of economic issues that women would otherwise have to face together, ultimately falling back on the good old "if a man gets pleasure from it, it's degrading to women" bit of patriarchal common sense. So that's that, then; just never behave sexually in public, and don't exist as anything other than a stereotypical female emo-bot who dreams of nothing but a loving long-term commitment. Then there'll be no exploitation of women!
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Yeah, probably not. Would that it were so easy. In reality, women do anywhere from 70%-80% of the world's work for less than 5% of the world's income. It's widely observed that women who marry and have children actually penalize themselves by working outside the home, since they will still end up doing the vast majority of domestic labor for the family on top their time spent out in the workforce. Any domestic work is, of course, unpaid, because it's a woman's place to rear heirs for man and country, after all. Why should women expect financial and social independence in life when they could have the connubial bliss that is indentured servanthood instead?
When it comes to the transactional nature of heterosexuality, I'm certainly not the first to suggest that marriage isn't the moral alternative to prostitution but a socially accepted, lower-cost, better-value-for-your-buck subtype of it. (Engels famously theorized that it was marriage that was the central institution of capitalism, as the unpaid labor of women fueled the system and kept it running.) In fact, I would even go so far as to say that, given the extremely low hourly rate of economic return that most married women settle for, it's even closer to sex slavery than prostitution is. If there's any doubt in your mind about whether marriage is still structured in transactional terms in Western society, take a look at this Forbes Magazine article on The Economics of Prostitution. It's pretty clear, economically, that the only difference between prostitution and marriage is the latter has a potentially reproductive benefit while the former doesn't. Women either sell their sex commodity or their reproductive commodity— often both at once— but they're always selling. 
Madonna gets it
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This doesn't mean that I think every woman would do better to work the streets rather than live with a partner for the sake of feminism. But it casts in sharp relief a deep ideological (and just plain logical) inconsistency on the part of the 'sex-negative', anti-sex work branch of feminism. The failure of certain feminists to support sex workers in their fight for legitimation, legalization, and the right to police protection effectively plays directly into the hands of patriarchal madonna/whore logic, where (as Valenti discusses in The Purity Myth) "good girls" guard the value of their sex commodity in order to get a higher price on the marriage market and "bad girls" devalue their sex commodity by exchanging it for cash/favors/pleasure rather than commitment.
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The irony of this way of thinking is, of course, that sex workers actually make much more than married women who work "straight" jobs, simultaneously minimizing their hours of unpaid labor rather than maximizing them. Unmarried sex workers are much freer economically than married women are, in every conceivable sense of the word. So it's very odd to me that feminists who constantly call for more structural analysis, more emphasis on global, economic matters choose to ignore exactly these factors when they discuss sex work. Instead, they focus on a moralistic reading of female behavior founded in an essentialized notion of what women are and should want. It turns out that, ultimately, these feminists really believe that women are "naturally" inclined to be what patriarchal society always insisted they were: intellectually feeble, irrationally emotional, dependent creatures who really just need to cuddle and have sweet nothings whispered into their ears, and are therefore all too easily taken advantage of by men. Women never, ever take advantage of men in this scenario; the relationship between men and women is a subject/object relationship. An actor/receiver, active/passive dyad forms where men are always on top.
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Any woman who departs from this prescribed gender role, or from stereotypically feminine sexual behavior, is instantly pathologized by these budding feminist folk psychologists (that's not really ok with her, they'll insist—she's just doing that because her evil pimp talked her into it... or some other man must have manipulated her into it. She was probably molested as a child and now she's psychologically damaged. Etc. Tellingly, no such assumptions are made of male sex workers.) Where this logic reigns, the double-standard for sexual behavior is reinforced as women (and men) try to convince themselves that getting married is primarily a private, romantic undertaking, rather than an economic and social one. At the same time, the structural underpinnings of sex work are ignored in favor of an individualistic, "moral" condemnation of the actions of sex workers and their customers. How, exactly, is this supposed to be good for the movement? I'd love to know.
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To my mind, the only way to avoid furthering a patriarchal logic where women are commodities is not to criminalize or stigmatize sex work according to a moralistic (read: phallic discursive) set of imperatives: the only way forward is to push for solidarity among all female laborers while refusing to settle for policies and cultural values that would continue to promote female economic dependency on men. There's no place in feminism for easy answers that would further privatize the frame around female sexuality. There's no time for pretending that it's only sex workers who are economically or sexually exploited under capitalism. It's time to acknowledge that, until there are no markets left, all sexuality will be commodifiable. And then we need to find a way to do something about it.