Marx and the party girls

I think it's fair to say that Marx didn't write a great deal about prostitution and brothels - but he certainly wasn't a fan.

In the Marxist tradition, a 'sex worker' (in a business framework) is just another worker selling her (it's usually her) labour power to create surplus value. Once a brothel has employed her, their interest is to maximise the value of her activities. Her own choices in the matter are not a major concern.

This creates an ideological problem for those naive enough to believe that brothels have, as their main function, to make 'sex work' safer. So in this recent BBC website article, Sabrinna Valisce writes:

""They started talking about how stigma against 'sex workers' was the worst thing about it, and that prostitution is just a job like any other," Valisce remembers.

It somehow made what she was doing seem more palatable.

She became the collective's massage parlour co-ordinator and an enthusiastic supporter of its campaign for the full decriminalisation of all aspects of the sex trade, including pimps.

"It felt like there was a revolution coming. I was so excited about how decriminalisation would make things better for the women," she says. ...

But she soon became disillusioned.

The Prostitution Reform Act allowed brothels to operate as legitimate businesses, a model often hailed as the safest option for women in the sex trade.

In the UK, the Home Affairs Select Committee has been considering a number of different approaches towards the sex trade, including full decriminalisation. But Valisce says that in New Zealand it was a disaster, and only benefited the pimps and punters. ...

"I thought it would give more power and rights to the women," she says. "But I soon realised the opposite was true."

One problem was that it allowed brothel owners to offer punters an "all-inclusive" deal, whereby they would pay a set amount to do anything they wanted with a woman.

"One thing we were promised would not happen was the 'all-inclusive'," says Valisce. "Because that would mean the women wouldn't be able to set the price or determine which sexual services they offered or refused - which was the mainstay of decriminalisation and its supposed benefits."

Aged 40, Valisce approached a brothel in Wellington for a job, and was shocked by what she saw.

"During my first shift, I saw a girl come back from an escort job who was having a panic attack, shaking and crying, and unable to speak. The receptionist was yelling at her, telling her to get back to work.

I grabbed my belongings and left," she says."

It's reminiscent of children aged 9 or 10 working 18 hour days, which Marx wrote so scathingly about in Capital Vol 1. Surprisingly, despite their liberated views on sexuality, the elite don't seem very happy that their own daughters should move into sex work.

Evolutionary psychology reminds us of what we all know. Women in general are quite choosy who they have sex with, since their mate will provide half the genes of their children.

The corresponding and innate emotional, psychological drives are violated in both prostitution and rape.

Because the former is generally economically-motivated rather than inflicted by violence, the sisterhood gets confused. Muddying the water is that phenomenon of social parasitism, female psychopathy, exhibiting a strategy of promiscuity which can apparently make prostitution a congenial occupation for them. You can always find a woman to tell you that prostitution is great.

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Anomie, the felt pointlessness of life, is frequently seen on the evening streets. This is the subject of a new Channel 5 TV show (which screams 'trash'), entitled "Bad Habits, Holy Orders: what happened when five party girls moved into a convent" featured in The Times today.

"Five new girls arrive at the Daughters of Divine Charity convent in Swaffham, deep in rural Norfolk. The first, Paige, 23, has, between her red go-go boots and her miniskirt, a gap large enough to display the entire face of Nicki Minaj that is tattooed on her thighs. She is struggling to pull a suitcase the size of a small wagon across the gravel courtyard. It’s full of her clubbing lingerie. She is joined by Rebecca, 19, another committed hedonist who seems to sum up their situation when she realises what their new home is, crying: “F***, I’m in a f***ing nunnery.”

"It’s a fair guess that this Channel 5 reality-TV experiment, called Bad Habits, Holy Orders, wouldn’t have taken much of a “sell”. “Think Sister Act,” the executive would say, “crossed with St Trinian’s.” Then, more sheepishly, wiping the froth off his chin: “It’s basically some party girls in G-strings in a convent.” And lo it came to pass."

So what do you think? Wildly self-centred, tantrum-prone party girls met by uncomprehending, disapproving nuns? It all ends in some gigantic, collective hissy-fit?

You wouldn't be more wrong.

"Then it is time to have tea with Sister Thomas More and Sister Francis, a double act of smiley, grandmotherly types from mother-superior central casting. I open with what I think is a small-talk question about why modesty is important for nuns. “They seemed to be in the habit of wearing very little,” says Sister Thomas More of the visitors. “I think it’s a turn-on isn’t it, for men? If you are completely naked, you are asking for trouble . . . We have ourselves to blame sometimes. So I think modesty is important.”

"At this the PR woman looks up from her laptop: “But no means no for women, doesn’t it?”

"Sister Thomas More says: “Sometimes they don’t know what no means, do they?”

"I try to help out: men should respect consent no matter how a woman is dressed?

“That’s all right if you’re with men who are going to respect it.”

"We move on. Their views are representative of a generation who grew up in a more restrictive age for women. Their calling as nuns, they tell me, has given them a life of travel and freedom that surpassed the alternative life of domesticity that was awaiting them.

"In practice, their attitude to the young women is fond and non-judgemental; mostly they are worried for them. Sister Francis clucks over them, concerned that they are “chilly” in their minimal garments and sympathetic to the aesthetic pressures society puts on them."

And what about the effects (of the nunnery) on the girls?

"Rebecca, as no one would have predicted, loves her session with the nuns in an old people’s home. After she leaves the convent she gives up clubbing, starts a long-term relationship, returns to college to do a healthcare qualification and reconciles with her father, who says that her going to the convent had achieved all that he never could. “You broke me,” he tells Rebecca.

"Gabbi says she felt her Instagram feed was all that people valued her on. “I felt useless.” The convent helped her to “remember being back when I was 14, the last time I felt like my real self”.

"Tyla is volunteering with the homeless. Paige gets a tattoo of a crucifix and Sarah changes her hours — she used to sleep from 7am to 5pm; now she works as a personal assistant. Her friends tell her to stop talking about moderation. They say: “Sarah, we don’t even know what it means.”

"There’s only one word for the young women’s attitude to their transformation: evangelical. If they do post on social media, it is to urge compassion, with the hashtag “love yourself”, which they thought up together at the convent. It isn’t quite “love God” or “love thy neighbour”, but it means a lot to them just the same. "

The God who gives a value system and sense of community to the nuns may be illusory, but by believing in Him their lives do gain purpose. In an evolutionary sense it's hopeless - as 'Brides of Christ' their genes are terminated - but in the environment of evolutionary adaptation which selected for their sense of communal dedication, their instincts were aligned with best and most successful social practice.

In a society where the economic structure assigns the orderly 'production of surplus value under the direction of the capitalist enterprise' as the individualised purpose of each non-elite person's life, the constellation of human psychological drives do struggle to gain traction in daily routines.

The failure of the Tory party to inspire people, the success of Momentum ('The World Transformed'): these phenomena are not hard to understand.

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Note

It is commonplace, in this sort of article, to say that anomie will be overcome under socialism or some such. Sadly, no further justification is ever given.

The previous generation often observed that life had never been more meaningful than during World War II. There was a sense of comradeship and community in the war which they missed ever after.

One is hardly surprised. Humans evolved in small groups faced with towering existential problems which only collective teamwork could overcome. We are descended from those who succeeded in that, so it's no surprise we feel fulfilled by collective teamwork in situations of existential threat.

But wasn't socialism/communism going to eliminate existential threat? Won't we all be terribly bored? And wasn't that always the critique of Heaven and all utopias?

A compelling criticism indeed, perhaps only to be addressed by the directed modification of our own psychologies under communism. Marx wrote,

"In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

Marx, German Ideology (1845).

Not everyone will think this a description of their own utopia! But Marx is plainly on to something in the matter of choice. We'll have to identify worthwhile objectives (as a Darwinian I'd be thinking pro-survival and pro-expansion), arranging that we self-engineer both capability and desire.