On Sex Work, Capitalism and Bourgeois Morality

The brief analysis sketched out below uses a nineteenth-century European painting as a point of access into a general discussion about sex work. It specifically asks why sex work is so disruptive to a white bourgeois worldview that persists today… ahem, cultural hegemony. This text is only a brief engagement with a highly complex topic. It does not address different types of sex work, nor does it delve into a nuanced intersectional analysis that would address race, sexuality, disability, gender expression, and age. The reader should keep in mind that racial and ethnic minorities are overrepresented in the sex industry in North America because of the violent legacies of colonialism.  Finally, the decriminalization of sex work is a racial justice issue, a feminist imperative, and crucial to the protection of vulnerable members of the queer community.

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Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas, 130 × 190 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

In 1865, at the Paris Salon, Edouard Manet exhibited a painting titled Olympia. The painting depicts a woman reclining on a bed in a bourgeois domestic interior. She is nude, except for a black ribbon around her neck and a pair of mules on her feet. She stares blankly at the viewer, her hand covering her genitals, while a black domestic worker presents her with a large bouquet of flowers. The painting shocked the Parisian public and was critically panned, ridiculed both for its subject matter and the ‘unfinished’ quality of the work. Unlike the traditional reclining nude, the woman in Manet’s painting was not a goddess, nor was she asleep or looking away, thus unaware of our consumption of her nudity. She was not beautiful, nor was her body smoothed out by the artist’s traditional use of optical trickery. The criticism and shock were not only due to Manet’s desecration of a sacred trope in Western art by painting a nude woman badly. It was due to the contemporaneity of the subject: she is a sex worker greeting a client who, in the ‘world’ of the painting, is the viewer. The bourgeois visitor of the Paris Salon was, therefore, confronted with a modern reality that called into question the integrity of their precious bourgeois morality (after all, they would have been her clients): beneath the surface appearance of modern capitalist society and its values of liberty, equality, and prosperity for all, hides the exploitation of the productive and reproductive capacity of human bodies. I am not suggesting that this was a conscious realization. Rather, I suggest that the visual pleasure that the female nude was meant to provide the male viewer was, in this case, interrupted by Olympia’s decried ‘ugliness’ but more specifically by her profession and its exposure of the inherent hypocrisy and exploitative nature of a society structured around patriarchal ideologies and a capitalist ethos based on the extraction of value from human labour.

Capitalism was a defining feature of modernity in the nineteenth century. Industrial capitalism became the dominant economic system, causing significant shifts in how people met their basic material needs. Without access to natural resources and common lands, a majority of the population was forced into waged labour in industrialized urban areas. With limited rights and access to education, and no political voice, women were forced to seek legal and financial protection through marriage, exchanging their sexual capacity and presumed ability to bear children for the material means needed for their survival. Interestingly, during this historical interval, “love” becomes part of the marriage equation. This affective dimension further supported the notion that women’s natural position as workers within the home should be unwaged as their labour was performed out of love and care for their husbands and families. Working-class unmarried women were forced into low-paying occupations, and some, with limited options and facing poverty, were forced into sex work to survive. They too exchanged their sexual capacity, however, outside the ‘no-less transactional’ relationship of marriage, which gave women the little social capital accessible to them by a bourgeois morality that promoted their “self-identification as wives and mothers” (Marlene Dixon, “The Subjugation of Women Under Capitalism: The Bourgeois Morality,” 1977). That is, as reproductive workers tasked with maintaining the home, childbearing and rearing, and providing their husbands with sexual pleasure to which women had no legal right to refuse (marital rape was legal in Canada until 1983). Under this particular set of conditions — patriarchal and capitalist — reproductive labour was (and arguably still is) believed to be women’s naturally given occupation, and because it is not “productive” in terms of producing commodities to bring to market, it is undervalued and, therefore, unwaged.

I use this nineteenth-century painting as a point of departure to give a visual anchor to this text and also to contextualize sex work within the wider transactional framework that governs capitalist hetero-patriarchal society, whose moral and ideological foundations require a strict division of labour along the lines of gender as well as a guarantee of patrilineal continuity for the lawful transfer of private property, justifying control over women’s bodies. It is precisely these moral and ideological foundations that sex work disrupts so profoundly, foundations understood to maintain a well-ordered society according to the groups who benefit most from its hierarchical ordering.  But first, let’s address the supportive relationship between capitalism and patriarchy; that is, between an economic system that is rooted in private property and the accumulation of capital, and a social structure where power is concentrated in the hands of men, governed by men, and in the interest of men.

While patriarchy was established well before capitalism, the two have a symbiotic relationship, upholding one another through their dependence on a gendered division of labour. Capitalism is an economic system focused on maximizing profit to accumulate capital, concentrating wealth at the top while the majority exchange their labour for a wage. In order to accumulate a maximum of capital during its early rise, capitalism required an unwaged workforce, and according to feminist scholar Silvia Federici (Caliban and the Witch, 2014), the legal infantilization of women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and imperial expansion gave Western powers the unwaged workforce needed during this initial period of accumulation of capital: women and slaves. The rise of capitalism coincides with the period of expansion and the slave trade, as well as the witch hunts and the gradual legal infantilization of women, rendering them more dependent on their male counterparts and more specifically the couple form. At a time when women could not easily provide for themselves if at all, female sexual and reproductive capacity was both a woman’s currency and value. Considering this, it is rather fair to assume that the sale of sexual services would be disruptive to a system that privatizes and polices women’s bodies and which many women have been conditioned to support.

Olympia  was painted a mere fifteen years after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto and four years before Mark published part I of Das Kapital, his in-depth analysis and critique of a capitalist mode of production, in which he exposes capitalism’s fundamental restructuring of human relations.  By the way, click here for a quick breakdown of how patriarchal society developed https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/sep/analysis-how-did-patriarchy-start-and-will-evolution-get-rid-it. Marx's analysis of the relationship between labour and commodities may give us insight as to why Olympia was so shocking in 1865 and why sex work is still plagued by moral stigma. Commodities are goods (products and services) that are brought to market and purchased to satisfy a need or a want. Under capitalism, the individuals who produce commodities exchange their labour power for a wage, while the owner of the means of production collects profits from the sale of the commodity on the market. And while the outsourcing of one’s labour pre-exists capitalism, capitalism conceals this exploitative extraction of wealth from the body of the labourer in the exchange of commodities. For example, when we buy an iPhone, we do not ‘see’ the labour that went into producing it: from the tech engineers who conceived it, to workers in the cobalt mine, to the Apple store clerk who brought it out of the stock room.  We can use our iPhone without thinking about the fact that exploitative practices were used to produce it. We can enjoy our scrolling without seeing the cobalt miner struggle to survive while the CEO of Apple relaxes on his yacht. Capitalism extracts value from bodies in a manner that maximizes profits and concentrates wealth into the hands of the few. Beyond the fact that, in many cases, an intermediary profits from the labour of sex workers, sex work collapses this abstract relationship between the commodity and the labour it conceals: labour power, the body,  and commodity are one and the same.

Manet’s Olympia unveiled the labour hiding behind the commodity by painting a sex worker who, by covering her genitals visually signals to the viewer that access to her body and labour are available only in exchange for that general equivalent value form (money) for which all other commodities are exchanged. With sex work, the abstract relationship between commodity and labour is rendered very concrete because the body performing the labour is also the commodity purchased. Add to that the moral implications outlined above, and sex work becomes an affront to patriarchal bourgeois morality, while exposing its abject hypocrisy. Fundamentally, sex work interrupts the spell cast by capitalist hetero-patriarchy that conceals the transactional nature of the traditional couple form, convincing us that women’s inherent value lies in their sexual and affective capacity channelled towards ‘reproducing’ the male worker who, in exchange, will provide for her. Within the purview of that patriarchal capitalist morality, her value on the market — her ability to provide sexual pleasure and continue his line — should not be monetized like other forms of labour but should be exchanged out of love and obligation. While these morals have loosened since the nineteenth century, unfortunately, 150 years and two feminist movements later, not much has changed. We are currently witnessing the vocal persistence of these traditional values most often shared by podcast bros who discuss women’s market value (literally) and lament women's disinterest in ‘doing the work’ to support their “king”: cook, clean, and fuck on command. But that’s for another post.

-S.S.

For more specific and in-depth studies on sex work, I suggest you look to the experts/texts listed below.

-Benoit, C. & Leah Shumka, Sex Work in Canada July 7, 2021 https://www.uvic.ca/research/centres/cisur/assets/docs/understanding-sex-work/2021-07-03-who-are-sex-workers-updated.pdf

-Bruckert, Chris, Colette Parent, Maria Nengeh Mensah, Patrice Corriveau, and Louise Toupin. Sex Work : Rethinking the Job, Respecting the Workers. . Translated by Käthe Roth. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013.

-Dewey, Susan, and Patty Kelly. Policing Pleasure : Sex Work, Policy, and the State in Global Perspective. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

-Durisin, Elya M., Emily Van der Meulen, and Chris Bruckert, eds. Red Light Labour : Sex Work Regulation, Agency, and Resistance. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2018.

-Goldenberg, Shira M., Ruth Morgan Thomas, Anna Forbes, and Stefan Baral, eds. Sex Work, Health, and Human Rights : Global Inequities, Challenges, and Opportunities for Action. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2021

-Nuttbrock, Larry A., ed. Transgender Sex Work and Society. New York, NY: Harrington Park Press, 2018.

-Price-Glynn, Kim. Strip Club : Gender, Power, and Sex Work. New York: NYU Press, 2010.

-Sankofa, Jasmine. From Margin to Center: Sex Work Decriminalization is a Racial Justice Issue, December 2016 https://www.amnestyusa.org/blog/from-margin-to-center-sex-work-decriminalization-is-a-racial-justice-issue/

-Selena. We Too : Essays on Sex Work and Survival. Edited by Natalie West and Tina Horn. First Feminist Press edition. New York City: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2021.

-Wolkowitz, Carol. Body/Sex/Work : Intimate, Embodied and Sexualized Labour. Edited by Rachel Lara Cohen, Teela Sanders, and Kate Hardy. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

For more on Manet and Olympia

-Clark, T. J. The Painting of Modern Life : Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers. Rev. ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999.

-Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. “Still Thinking About Olympia’s Maid.” The Art Bulletin 97, no. 4 (2015): 430–51.

-Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. Creole : Portraits of France’s Foreign Relations during the Long Nineteenth Century. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022.

-Getsy, David J. “How to Teach Manet’s Olympia after Transgender Studies.” Art History 45, no. 2 (2022): 342–69.