What should the legal status of prostitution be?

Prostitution is no different from other capitalist exploitation

Question: What should the legal status of prostitution be?
Position‹2 of 4›: Prostitution should be decriminalised
Argument‹2 of 7›: Prostitution is no different from other capitalist exploitation

Under the Marxist perspective, in a capitalist system the majority of jobs involve selling the body through the sale of labour.

The argument

As we are all compelled to sell our labour within a capitalist system, there is no reason the sale of sex is inherently different from any other service job. The argument proceeds by comparison, and the comparisons are chosen to strip out each feature that is usually said to make prostitution uniquely intolerable. The issues raised about prostitution already exist across the range of labour options poor women are offered. Both prostitution and factory work carry high health risks. Both prostitutes and domestic servants are hired to 'serve' in a way they themselves do not get to dictate. Both a prostitute and a masseuse use skill and direct bodily contact with clients for those clients' pleasure. Each objection, followed through, turns out to be an objection to conditions found throughout low-paid work rather than to sex work as such. If that is right, then arguments which single prostitution out are doing something other than what they claim. They are not weighing harms, because the same harms elsewhere do not produce the same demand for prohibition. They are intrinsically moralistic — responding to the fact that the service is sexual — rather than convincingly prioritising the rights of sex workers, who are the people the prohibition falls on. The conclusion follows from locating the problem correctly. What is wrong is the exploitation of all workers under the system, not something peculiar to prostitution that could be fixed by removing it. Criminalising the trade does not touch the compulsion to sell one's labour that generated it, while it does strip the people doing that work of the legal standing that other workers have to improve their conditions. Instead of prostitution being illegal, we should fight for the rights of all workers, prostitutes included.

Context

We live in a capitalist system in which workers are compelled to sell their labour in exchange for capital worth less than the goods they create. All workers suffer from exploitation under capitalism.

Premises

[P1]Under capitalism everyone is compelled to sell their labour, and selling sex is not inherently different from other service jobs that involve health risks, serving clients, or bodily contact. [P2] Arguments singling out prostitution are therefore moralistic rather than genuinely protective of workers, since the real problem is the exploitation of all workers. [C] Therefore, prostitution should be decriminalised and addressed by fighting for all workers' rights rather than banning it.

Counter-arguments

Including prostitution as an acceptable profession alongside any other is, in reality, a product of a neoliberal system in which everything is considered acceptable for an avenue for product. Prostitution fundamentally differs from other forms of selling labour as it is tied to repressive views on gender and marginalisation, and signals that women are sexual products for male consumption. Decriminalising prostitution perpetuates the idea that the oppression of women is acceptable. Additionally, unlike other professions people cannot freely ‘choose’ to enter prostitution; rather, they are forced to by circumstance. The state sanctioning of this industry is comparable to the state sanctioning of slavery.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] Prostitution is distinct from other labour.