Money | Transcript

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Franki Cookney:

When we turn sex into something that we do for our health and wellness, we are very quickly veering into betterment and self improvement and, “Oh, have an orgasm in the morning because it will make you more productive.” That's inherently capitalist.

Hannah Witton:

Do you feel pressure to treat your sexuality as a self improvement project?

Abigail Thorn:

The TERF question “What is a woman” is really a version of the question “what is a woman for?” With the implied answer being reproduction.

Hannah Witton:

How does capitalism impact and attempt to control our experience of gender?

Lydia Caradonna:

I would love for every sex worker in the world to feel, like, empowered and be raking in the money and love their job. But, on a more realistic level... I just want every sex worker to have all their needs met, you know?

Hannah Witton:

And if we all need money to survive, why is there a stigma around people who sell sex for money?

I'm Hannah Witton, and this is Doing It, the show that's unapologetically nerdy about sex, and dives into some of the biggest taboos that impact our relationship with sex, our bodies, and the people in our lives.

Across this series, we're exploring sex therapy, disability, porn, and parenting, but today we're talking money and capitalism, baby!

I've spent 12 years chatting about sex education on YouTube and interviewing loads of fascinating people on this podcast, and one theme keeps cropping up time and time again. So many lines of questioning end up there, so many issues we have around sex can be traced back to it, and it's central to politics, power, and control when it comes to sex. That thing is capitalism. So finally... it's time! No more simply mentioning it in passing, let's properly dive into capitalism and money, and how they shape our experience of sex, relationships, our body, and identity.

Like with all the topics we're covering in this series, this is a hefty one, and there's no way we can touch on every nuance or facet of how a beast like capitalism impacts sex. Instead, I want to highlight a couple of stories that really give us a flavour of how an economic system can intersect with our personal lives. So stick with me, we're going to explore the sexual wellness industry, trans rights and bodily autonomy, the nuclear family, and sex work. I know, they might seem disconnected, but they're all linked by capitalism.

In this episode there are mentions of transphobia and suicide, please take care of yourselves whilst listening.

Okay, so, first off, what is capitalism? And what kind of capitalism are we talking about here? One of the best definitions I've come across is from one of my favourite podcasts, Material Girls.

Hannah McGregor says, quote: “Neoliberalism, aka neoliberal capitalism, is a particular manifestation of capitalist thinking that is a characteristic of late capitalism. It's basically the expansion of the logic of capitalism to every aspect of our lives. So rather than capitalism being exclusively an economic concept, capitalism becomes the structuring logic of how we think about every relationship and every institution. So that logics of productivity, cost benefit, efficiency, optimisation, become deeply incorporated into every aspect of everything that we do.” End quote. Bam!

So, to help explain how these logics of capitalism work and get tangled up with our sexual and romantic relationships, I spoke to Sophie K Rosa, author of Radical Intimacy, which is all about our intimate lives under capitalism.

Sophie K Rosa:

I suppose the most obvious connection of capitalism to our lived experience is the fact that we have to work to survive. We have to have money to survive under capitalism. The fact that we have to spend most of our waking hours labouring, or most of us do, has a huge impact on what is possible in our lives, and that includes what is possible in our relationships and in our intimate lives.

There's no way of avoiding internalizing capitalism. It's the water we swim in, and we can't just free ourselves from that, and nor should we blame ourselves for the ways in which our experience of the world is our experience of the world. It's all we know, and we don't know who we would be outside of capitalism.

Franki Cookney:

I'm Franki Cookney, I'm a journalist, and I specialize in writing about sex and relationships.

Hannah Witton:

Frankie is a friend of mine, and someone I somehow find myself talking a lot with about sex and capitalism. So I was curious about when she first started making these connections.

Franki Cookney:

I do think probably it was around watching the kind of sex tech sexual wellness boom and from, I guess, like the 2010s onwards, when sex toys and sexual wellness products and sex tech suddenly became not just mainstream, but just absolutely everywhere, like YouTubers who previously covered sort of lifestyle would now - had sex toys on their shows and stuff. And it was becoming part of this whole fabric of what an aspirational lifestyle looks like. And I think anytime you suddenly just see a load of products everywhere and a load of things you can buy, that's a pretty big clue that capitalism is involved.

Hannah Witton:

This is definitely something I've noticed over the years. When I first started making sex education videos on YouTube in 2011, it was a pretty quiet place. And now, in 2023, there are loads more creators, influencers, journalists, writers, artists, podcasters talking about sex online. And whilst that's been an amazing vital part of normalizing sex, sex education, and sexual liberation, it's interesting to examine it from the commercial side of things.

Franki Cookney:

You're not sort of saying, oh, any time anyone buys a sex toy, like, they're just capitalist pigs, but I think it's when you start noticing that it's become, I guess, a goal and a bit accumulative, like more sex toys and more kinds of experiences and more kinds of sensations and have you ticked this thing off and have you tried that thing and also, here's a thing you didn't even know was a problem for you, but here I am to tell you it is, and here's the product that can fix it.

Are these sexual wellness brands, are these sex tech companies, are they doing it out of just cynicism wanting to make money, or are they really trying to solve problems? From my work, talking to brands and CEOs of sex tech startups and stuff, I think that a lot of them really do believe that they are solving society's problems in the sex and relationship sphere, and they certainly went into it with that as a really strong motivation. That's not necessarily incompatible with wanting to make money, or in fact needing to make money, because none of us can work for free.

Hannah Witton:

It's true, none of us can work for free, and the irony isn't lost on me that this sex podcast has a sponsor. A lot of these brands have pushed conversations about sex into the mainstream, or are at least trying to, but they also need money, and Franki had speculated that positioning sex as health and wellness was very much part of that strategy.

Franki Cookney:

Right from the very beginning of setting up a brand or an organization that works in sexual health or sexual pleasure, these startups really struggle to get funding, particularly in the States where people are trying to get investment from companies that have a lot of links with the church, Protestant church and Catholic church. It's very difficult to get funding for sex. So my instinct was, “Oh, that's why they're moving towards branding them as health products to get funding.”

But I think the thing that was interesting to me was that it's - on the other end as well, kind of framing these products as health and wellness products allow companies to take them into new markets where they previously couldn't access. I spoke to a really big sex toy company. Their spokesman, she was quite open about it.

She said, “Yeah, you know, it is about selling products, but it's also about being able to take our messaging into territories where sex lot more difficult. Whereas if we take it in as health and wellness. then it's much easier to access those markets.” And it's both, you know, like, yes, they want to sell products. And so it is cynical in that way, but equally taking kind of progressive educational messages about sex and relationships into parts of the world where that is very shut down is a real social issue that needs addressing.

Hannah Witton:

It is slippery because ultimately, it's about money and you need funding for that, has then the conversations around sex become more sanitized and so it's not really addressing the taboo, because it's almost like reinforcing that there is a taboo. But then also, you're working within the society that you've been given where, yeah, sex is a taboo. So if you want to engage people with these topics and you want any kind of social progress, you have to also meet people where they're at.

Franki Cookney:

And also, let's not forget, when we turn sex into something that we do for our health and wellness, we are very quickly veering into betterment and self improvement. And, “Oh, have an orgasm in the morning because it will make you more productive.” First of all, that's inherently capitalist. And second of all, it's just really taking away from the fact that sex is about having fun and pleasure and connection and making it about something we can sort of commodify and quantify it.

There was a product that came out a few years ago and the rhetoric around it was about how it was the only toy on the market that could help people with vulvas and vaginas achieve a blended orgasm. And I just felt like. I was standing in the middle of a room full of people going, “Guys, what the fuck is a blended orgasm? That's not, that's not a thing! And like, even if it is a thing, I'm happy with my orgasms, like, why do I need to pursue this kind of holy grail of orgasms?””

Hannah Witton:

It can be very easy to feel the pressure in our sex positive, open and empowered, girlboss society to have more sex and better sex, more orgasms and better orgasms. Capitalism never wants us to be satisfied with what we've got. We must always be striving, and therefore always buying. We see this most obviously when it comes to our work, our productivity, and the money we're paid. But it absolutely bleeds into our values around sex too. Here's Sophie again.

Sophie K Rosa:

I think there are myriad ways in which capitalist ideas, values impact our experiences of sex, but one way that comes to mind is sex as something that we, that we get. Sex itself as a commodity, which I think has a variety of different impacts and at worse is linked to sexual violence. You know, sex is something that we can just access like any other commodity, that some men believe that they have a right to access. As opposed to a culture in which we understand sex as relational and something that happens between people, something that is a unique encounter in every case between people and between different subjectivities, rather than this thing that has value inherently that we must attain, which at best might lead to pretty unenjoyable sex and at worst is linked to sexual violence.

Hannah Witton:

Sophie makes a really important point and this idea that sex is a commodity or something you get is particularly clear to me in the language around virginity. Virginity, we're told, is something that you can have, lose, take or give. It's about ownership. There's an idea that sex, specifically penis and vagina sex, has an inherent value and we see it in other spheres too.

Sophie K Rosa:

This can be especially prominent and obvious in the realm of dating apps, whereby we as individuals essentially kind of create a personal brand, market ourselves to other people, self commodify, objectify, inevitably such that someone else might choose us. But also, you know, this really predates dating apps: a kind of market logic within dating. The very language of dating is often very similar to the language of consumerism and the market. So yeah, “Are you on the market?” And with women, if, you know, “an older woman” or “she's on the shelf”, you know, it's the language of capitalism. The language of consumerism is just really written in, I think, particularly to dating.

Hannah Witton:

And what happens when you're no longer on the market? How does capitalism play a role in our relationship and family structures?

Sophie K Rosa:

The history of capitalism is tied up with the history of the nuclear family, the nuclear family being kind of the smallest unit of production almost, by which, like, labour - domestic labour - traditionally is taken on by women, and care is privatised in small units as opposed to community care.

But historically this has been about the heterosexual nuclear family. In more recent times, with the legalization of gay marriage, forms of LGBTQ+ life have been embraced by capitalism. The monogamous couple and the nuclear family in the society and culture that we live in has become so naturalized as if it is the only way to live, as if it is the right way to live. And in fact, of course, there are many ways to live.

Hannah Witton:

Frankie had some interesting reflections too.

Franki Cookney:

I am ethically non monogamous and while I think that there definitely are people out there who are pursuing types of ethical non monogamy in quite a capitalist way, you know, accumulating experiences, accumulating partners. The way I do it and the way I try to apply it to my life is anti capitalist in the sense that there's no ownership of any partner. It's about connection. It's about collaboration. It's about community. And all of those things feel inherently anti capitalist to me.

However, I'm reluctant to start going down that road because I don't want anyone to think that I think monogamy is inherently capitalist.

Hannah Witton:

Is it not?

Franki Cookney:

It is the favoured relationship structure of capitalism and I think it's just, you know, it's a lot easier to categorise and control. But, you know, when we talk about marriage and we talk about monogamy, particularly in circles of people who've maybe stepped away from it, there's a lot of talk of like, “Oh, marriage used to be about the woman becoming the man's property.” And yes, that is one example of what marriage symbolized in some cultures, but bonding rituals and valuing partnership between two people has existed across humanity, across time, and has meant lots and lots of different things and hasn't always precluded. community and connection. You know, the nuclear family is a reasonably new system. So I certainly wouldn't want to say that monogamy, marriage, pair bonding is inherently capitalist because it is not inherently capitalist, but it is the preferred option in capitalist society. And it certainly has - you know, capitalism has found its way into it.

I think that cisheterosexual monogamous relationships certainly teach us implicitly or explicitly to treat our partners like ours, like they are a thing we own. And I think it's more like a sense of entitlement around the way they behave and the things that you do together, and particularly sexually. So the kind of one really key example that comes to mind is the debate we see over and over again is whether or not it's okay for a partner to watch porn when they're in a relationship. This is about people sort of wanting all of that person's sexuality to belong to them. I do think some of it comes down to insecurity about “am I not enough?” But again, then we're buying into the idea that we should be everything to each other. That's coming into this ownership again, like there is enough love, enough sexual energy, enough desire, enough eroticism to go around. Like it's not a finite resource that we need to compete over. And it's just - it's the opposite of what I think sex is supposed to be, which is a connection.

Hannah Witton:

Okay, so how do we resist this thinking in our sex lives?

Franki Cookney:

I think actually what we need to do is get away from the idea that it's comparable, you know, and get away from the idea that by giving and putting in energy and thought and effort into our sex lives and our connections with sexual partners - and to be clear when I say partners, I don't just mean like our boyfriends, our spouses, you know, people we're in long term relationships with - I mean, literally a hooker, literally a one night stand. If we can get away from the idea that putting something into that encounter is a loss somehow, but actually look at it as like the more you put in, the more you get back. And it's a collaboration. I think going into sex as a collaboration and an opportunity for connection is the key to having anti capitalist sex.

Hannah Witton:

I love this idea of sex being more about collaboration and connection than ownership and gain. And speaking of collaboration, Sophie introduced me to a really interesting concept that encourages us to bring these values not just into our sex lives, but our wider family relations too.

Sophie K Rosa:

I've become really interested in and convinced by the concept of family abolition, which I first encountered by reading the work of a writer called Sophie Lewis.

The idea of family abolition looks at the history of the unit of the nuclear family, which is traditionally made up of a husband, a wife, and children in a private household. And it looks at how this as a unit involves the privatization of care, involves the oppression of women, and in many cases of children. And it essentially critiques that as the only form of kind of care within our societies as one that is really lacking. You know, at best, just lacking in resource in terms of energy and provision, and at worst, being a container for patriarchal violence and the oppression of women and children and violence and abuse where it can become contained and hidden from the outside world, and also it's a unit from which queer children are often rejected. And the concept is not about destroying anybody's family or even necessarily saying that we shouldn't relate in units that look a lot like the nuclear family, but it's about looking at what supposedly the nuclear family is supposed to provide. For example, abiding care, loyalty, devotion, love, togetherness, and safety, refuge, and saying that everybody deserves those things. Everybody deserves those feelings. And how can we organize society such that everybody can access care, nobody's overburdened, nobody is subject to abuse within private households.

So yeah, it's really about an expansion of care, a communalizing of care, transformation as opposed to destruction. And it's about expanding those ideals and those experiences such that everybody can be safe and secure and provided for in the world.

Hannah Witton:

I'd never heard of family abolition before and found the concept so interesting. As someone who is very much in a nuclear family, I really feel this need for community care, and care from the state. I feel like we're not getting the support we need when it comes to raising a child and just being happy. And we're a cis white middle class couple, very privileged, and yet we're here like… “Hello! Where's the help and support?”

Abigail Thorn:

Well, how does money impact your sex life? It's 15 quid for a cocktail in London, goddammit. That's how it impacts my sex life.

Hannah Witton:

This is Abigail Thorne, actress and creator of Philosophy Tube. I wanted to speak to Abby to help us zoom out a bit. We can see and feel some of the impacts capitalist culture has on our sex lives, dating, and relationships. But what about gender? What is going on there? And why is capitalism so obsessed with and invested in the gender binary?

Abigail Thorn:

Well, a Marxist feminist perspective, which is kind of in vogue at the moment, would go back to an author like Silvia Federici and would say that the enslavement, some would say, or some would say confinement of women to reproducing the labor force is essential for ensuring capitalist production continues.

Women have to be, to a certain extent, made to have babies so that there's people to go and work, and so that society can keep reproducing itself. So you kinda need to keep women under the thumb. And in order to do this, you need an ideology which justifies it, which portrays women as being subhuman, and essentially worthy of or suited to this subjugation, and that ideology is misogyny.

So, if you're gonna have an ideology that justifies people's subjugation, you need to... First of all, have some essential way of identifying those people. A friend of mine, Sophie from Mars, is fond of saying that the TERF question, “what is a woman?”, is really a version of the question, “what is a woman for?” with the implied answer being reproduction.

So first of all, this ideology needs to essentially identify a group of people to be subjugated. And secondly, it also needs to portray them as by nature suited to this subjugation. And often for bonus points it will portray this subjugation as not really subjugation but just, you know, a different kind of liberty, where people will say, “Oh men and women are equal, we're just different. We're suited to different things, like men are suited to, you know, going out and like being the breadwinner and like women are suited to being at home.” And the trick in that complementarian model is that the spheres that men are supposedly suited to are the spheres that have all the levers of control of society in them. So women, the sphere, that's the one that's at home where you don't have any power and you don't get any independence from men. Like it's just - you essentially identify a group, you portray their subjugation as being natural, sometimes grounded in nature, or you can do a religious vision where you say, no, it's actually ordained by God. And then for bonus points, you can try and gaslight them into saying it's not really subjugation.

Hannah Witton:

Abi mentioned TERFs, which stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, although there's absolutely nothing radical or feminist about transphobia. So once you have this system, capitalism, and ideology, misogyny, that tries to split people into two categories of gender for production and reproduction purposes, that system and ideology is not going to like it when people are like, “Hang on, I don't want that role.” Or, in Abby's case, “You got my gender wrong.” And the thing is, its definitions of those roles and identities are super narrow and unattainable for pretty much everyone to begin with.

Abigail Thorn:

I guess certainly there's a degree to which femininity, both for cis women and trans women, is kept from us if we do not meet certain ideals and those ideals, you do kind of need money to achieve. Body ideals and fashion ideals that women are told to achieve are often things that you need a lot of money to actually do. I mean, I definitely think that as a woman in the public eye in Britain, the closer you are to Kate Middleton, then the easier time you're going to have. And Kate Middleton was a millionaire before she became a royal. So, you know, you really do need an awful lot of money to get close to, I think, the feminine ideal, not that there's one.

Hannah Witton:

So what does it mean in this society for trans and gender non conforming people? And how does access to money and resources impact a person's ability to explore their gender and, in many cases, simply live?

Abigail Thorn:

One of the big areas in which this happens is trans healthcare. In Britain, trans healthcare is de facto not available on the NHS. De facto because in most areas the waiting list will be upward of 20 to 30 years, which is essentially useless. Some of us die before we are ever seen.

The reason those waiting lists are so long is because the NHS runs a segregated system. For example, if a cisgender woman wants hormone replacement therapy, she can get it from a GP. If a transgender woman wants the exact same medicine, she has to go to a segregated clinic for which there is a 20 to 30 year wait. There is no need to do that. The NHS has been told for over 10 years to desegregate the system and they have so far ignored it.

Transition care is not available on the NHS at all. De jure, it is not available for children anywhere. There is currently nowhere in the UK that is treating trans children, which is particularly dangerous. So, in Britain, if you are trans, either you go private, which means you need a lot of money, or you buy hormones on the black market, which if you're a transgender man and you want testosterone is illegal, so you risk criminal repercussions as well, or you die. Those are the three options. Sophie Williams was a trans woman who spent I think more than five years on the NHS waiting list before she very sadly took her own life. The coroner concluded in the investigation into her death that the NHS's failure to provide gender affirming care was one of the factors that led to it. So it is a matter of publicly recorded fact that the NHS's failures in this area have resulted in the death of patients.

So, in summary, how does your money impact your ability to explore your gender? If you are trans in Britain and you don't have a lot of money, either you self medicate or you die.

Hannah Witton:

This is not an exaggeration, and I think it's so important to get real about what a lack of resources and a system and society that is against you means for people. So with this being a life and death matter, how do trans people step in and support each other when there are such inadequate resources and services?

Abigail Thorn:

One thing that the UK trans community is really good at doing is taking care of each other and helping us get access to medicine, on like the black market. And also helping people, you know, navigate the NHS as best we can.

I know a lot of girls who've had to do a crowdfund for their medicine. I know a lot of girls who do sex work to afford medicine, to afford rent, which is, you know, especially an option if you are discriminated against in employment and you can't get anything else. That community support is important because the state fails us.

If you are trans and in Britain, you are very much outside the realm of the rules. The rules will not protect you. I've had theatres refuse to work with me because I'm trans. I'm one of the most privileged and recognisable trans people probably in the country, and that still happens to me. It's completely illegal.

Hannah Witton:

The UK is becoming an increasingly hostile place for trans people, and we're going to come back to this idea of who is outside the realm of the rules. But let's explore this situation of a lack of resources and an oppressive system as it relates to sex work. I want to bring in Lydia Caradonna. Lydia is a sex worker in a brothel and an activist part of Decrim Now and the Sex Workers Union in the UK.

Before we dive in, I asked Lydia how she defines sex work.

Lydia Caradonna:

That's actually a strangely controversial question. Because there are so many things... that could be sex work, but also could not be sex work. So some sex work is weirdly, kind of inherently non sexual. So you will have people who, for example, make fetish content, who will be doing things that don't involve genitals at all. So it's actually very, very hard to define what sex work is.

But I think a good basic definition of it would be selling either a service that is sexual or that entices sexual feelings. But we would also say that sex work doesn't necessarily have to be selling things for money. It could be in exchange for food, for shelter, for drugs. We would count all of this as sex work.

Hannah Witton:

So, how did Lydia start doing sex work?

Lydia Caradonna:

I'm a domestic abuse survivor. A lot of people who enter the sex industry are people who don't necessarily have family or savings or a partner who can be a financial resource when you're running out of options. So, I left home at 18. I had basically no real options to be able to survive. And it just seemed like the only way I could continue studying and maybe improve my circumstances in the future was to find a job that had very flexible hours and earned me quite a bit of money in a short amount of time so I could work it around my disability. But that was never me working through my childhood or anything that happened to me. That was me not having the option. If there was a convenient grant being paid into my bank account that had enough money in, I don't think I would ever have been into sex work.

Hannah Witton:

Do you think that people often forget money as like one of the main incentives of why people get into sex work?

Lydia Caradonna:

Constantly. Every sex worker is in it for the money. Even if you've got someone who's saying like, “I do this because I love it,” there's still money changing hands. The point at which it becomes sex work is the point at which resources are transferred over. And I think quite often, the people who are having debates around sex work and whether or not sex work should exist are people who haven't necessarily had to worry about meeting their basic needs and having financial resources. So for them, sex work can exist as this theoretical thing. “Is this right? Is it safe? Is it objectification?” Whereas the people who are on the ground doing it: it's all about money. When I went into sex work, I didn't really have a choice to think about whether or not it was empowering. I knew I needed money. This was the way I was going to be able to get money.

We were thinking during the cost of living crisis -

Hannah Witton:

Lydia is talking about herself and other sex workers here.

Lydia Caradonna:

- all of the things that we need are the things that everyone who's struggling in this country needs right now. We need affordable housing. We need access to food. We need basically every basic need that everyone else has. And that's the thing that you can do to help a sex worker is get those needs met.

Hannah Witton:

Let's stay with these fundamental human needs. Here's Abigail on what she feels is the biggest issue facing trans people in Britain.

Abigail Thorn:

The big issue in the British trans community is healthcare and access to healthcare. Just access to the means that we need to live is one of the big issues in the community. And healthcare, but also... housing. Employment that doesn't discriminate against you. Again, de jure it's illegal to discriminate against trans people that are in employment or housing. De facto, I can tell you it happens. Employment without discrimination would be nice.

I think there certainly is a degree to which freedom in capitalist societies is portrayed for people of all genders as the freedom to consume. It's noticeable that in the last few centuries, women have gained the power to enter the workforce, certainly, which is lovely, but also at the same time, it's like to enter a specifically capitalist workforce with an unsustainable economic practice. So you know, really, how free are you without basic economic rights?

Hannah Witton:

Just a little note, I had this conversation with Abi before the news that the UK's Conservative government, instead of making it easier for trans people to access healthcare, or reducing waiting times for everyone, or paying doctors and nurses better, are planning to ban trans women from women only wards in hospitals. This is nothing more than transphobic, bigoted scapegoating.

Abi also mentioned employment, so on this topic of basic human rights, I wanted to come back to Lydia, as labour rights is something that so often gets ignored when it comes to sex workers, and is also massively wrapped up in their profession's legal status.

Lydia Caradonna:

Lots of people are really surprised to hear that it is totally legal to buy and sell sex in the UK. We have what we call partial criminalization, or also legalization, those are the same thing, where the criminalization in the sex industry happens on all of these associated activities. So while I can sell sex, I can't have any help. I can't have a manager. I can't have a friend who answers my phone for me. I can't work in a flat with one other girl and no managers. And that's because there are several laws that are really the issue.

The first one is brothel keeping law. So a brothel is defined as two or more sex workers selling sex under the same roof, even if it's not at the same time. So if you share a flat with a friend for safety or even to just save on rent, even if you're always working alone and you're never even in it at the same time, you both count as brothel keeping.

And then the other thing is third party laws. So managing sex work in any way makes you legally a pimp. And that is one of those laws where it kind of sounds okay because pimps shouldn't be making money off of sex workers, everyone should keep their money, but actually like it ignores a load of things.

The first is that quite often sex workers are legally managing each other. If they answer the door for a friend, or if they answer their friend's phone, or if they're sharing premises, they can both get done for managing each other's sex work, even if there's no actual hierarchy, which is the reason we can't really work collectively without facing criminal danger.

And it also, interestingly, means that sex workers can't really have partners or families because that person is profiting off the sex work of another person. My lovely boyfriend lives under the same roof as me and I pay my rent selling sex. So he is getting shelter from another person's sex work. He's legally a pimp.

Essentially, to work legally in the sex industry in the UK, you have to own your own property. No one else can live there. You can't be married, and you entirely hold all of your money, and you can sell sex from there. But anyone else, anyone who's falling outside of that deviation, becomes criminalized, which makes it very, very dangerous.

The way to stay legal is to work dangerously, to have no one accompanying you. So clients will often target girls who are independent because they are working alone and they know that they have to be - bad clients who want to do violence to them. And the the perpetrator has said, “Well, you're not gonna call the police. This is a brothel. This isn't legal.” So it makes you really, really vulnerable if you're breaking the law.

It's also means that people like me who have ADHD and can't be dealing with all that advertising or people who have like caring commitments and need to not be on 24/7 doing their ads and answering the phone need to just be able to like pull a four hour shift in a massage parlour.

We're forced to work under a managed system. We're forced to work illegally if we need any help, if we can't manage it ourselves. So, disproportionately, people who are disabled, are chronically ill, or who may not have English as their first language, we're sort of pushed into these criminalized workplaces where we can't advocate for ourselves.

Hannah Witton:

Because of all this, sex workers advocate for decriminalisation. So what does that mean?

Lydia Caradonna:

Decriminalisation is stripping back the laws that exist around sex work, whereas legalisation is essentially writing sex work into the law. Legalisation generally means you define a form of acceptable sex work. Whereas with decriminalization, you're sort of taking sex work out of criminal law. And that doesn't mean that people can do anything to a sex worker, or that it's legal to - it would still be illegal, for example, to purchase sex from a trafficked woman. It would still be illegal to traffic someone. It would still be illegal to force someone to do sex work against their will. All of this stuff would still obviously be illegal. But the sex work itself, you wouldn't fall foul of laws that are criminalizing that.

The law doesn't decide what is wrong and right. What I think that the law is mainly there for - intended to be there for - is harm reduction, right? And we have seen that under decriminalization, there is less violence against sex workers. Sex workers feel more able to say no to a client. Sex workers feel more able to access the criminal justice system if they so want to. So decriminalization makes it safer and gives us more access to the resources we would need to leave the sex industry in the first place. We are campaigning for the full decriminalization of the sex industry in the UK.

And we really approach sex work from a harm reduction stance. We are just being realistic that people are doing sex work. What's the way that we can make them safer? What's the way that we can give them more rights? And so all of the evidence kind of points to decrim. But from a very labor focused perspective, If we're not receiving the, like, bare minimum things that other workers would be legally entitled to, we can't do a picket line because the police would come and raid us. We can't take our employer to tribunal. And because people who manage sex work are already breaking the law and are already happy with breaking the law, we basically have no negotiating power because, unlike other unionized workforces, we can just be fired and we have absolutely no options there. Quite often the line you'll hear in the sex industry is, “Well, if you don't like it, you can work somewhere else.”

Hannah Witton:

But what about when you don't have any other options? And what happens when things out of your control, like, I don't know, a pandemic or a cost of living crisis happen?

Lydia Caradonna:

There was a lot of, like, pearl clutching journalism when the cost of living crisis began. Where whenever there's some kind of crisis, we just get approached for comment about, like, how many people have been pushed into sex work because of this. And it was getting really annoying. And so we decided to start Hookers Against Hardship, which is a campaign that's collaborative between loads of sex worker rights groups and other organizations, so that we could reframe the debate as saying, “Actually, sex workers need the same things that everyone needs. We need to be safe from poverty, not from prostitution. We need affordable housing. We need access to food. We need accessible workplaces. We need free childcare. Like, all of these things that everyone else is struggling with are the things that would help sex workers the most.” We wanted to kind of form a united front and stop being pulled into debates about whether it's right or empowering, and say, “We're doing sex work because we need money. Here's all of the things that would help a sex worker and give a sex worker more options.”

Hannah Witton:

For people who are like anti sex work, would a viable solution to present to them be like, why don't you just give sex workers loads of money? Give them all the resources that they need.

Lydia Caradonna:

You know, interestingly, we tweet that a lot. We'll say, “Oh, if you guys want to end the sex industry, here's my CashApp, like, I will not go to work tonight.” And none of them have ever come through. It's always other sex workers kind of passing around money so people don't have to work when they're not feeling great. It's never the people who want to end the sex industry who are willing to like put their money where their mouth is and sponsor a whore to leave it.

Hannah Witton:

Lydia mentioned these debates about whether or not sex work is empowering, and I wanted to explore that idea more.

Lydia Caradonna:

Lots of sex worker activists would say, “Well, you think that I'm being exploited and I'm a victim. I'm actually empowered and I'm here to tell you that I'm empowered.” And it became such a big part of the discourse that it kind of shot the sex worker movement in its foot.

It framed the debate in whether or not we were empowered and whether our jobs were okay because we enjoyed them and whether we were making the big money. And that's not the debate that we want to be having because someone can always say, “Okay, so you're the empowered exception. But there's these people who aren't empowered.”

There's these people who aren't making money, who have no choice because they’re poor. And it sort of turns into this weird thing where like the sex industry is pitted against each other. I just think there has been like a lack of voice coming from sex workers who do not feel empowered. And I think that's the point at which we win the debate, is if we say, you know what, for the sex worker in the worst situation you can think of, decrim's still gonna help. You can hate the sex industry if you want, but the way that we are kept safe is through decrim.

I would love for every sex worker in the world to feel, like, empowered and be raking in the money and love their job. But, on a more realistic level, I just want every sex worker to have all their needs met. You know?

Lots of people think that sex workers need, like, self esteem classes because we must be in sex work because we don't love ourselves. But I think I'm in sex work because I love myself. And I said, “I deserve a job where I can work three days a week and I can call in in the morning and say, ‘You know what? I don't feel like it.’ And I deserve a job where I don't have to try and learn all these like weird neurotypical social scripts and do office politics. And I deserve a job where I can just decide to take a month off if I can afford it. And I don't have to ask permission to go to a funeral. I think I'm in sex work because I love myself enough that I think my happiness is more important than society thinking I'm disgusting or not.”

Hannah Witton:

Across this episode we've touched on sex toys and polyamory, trans healthcare and sex work, and the nuclear family too. It goes without saying that there's so much more we could have talked about. Disability, race, and abortion rights also intersect with capitalism and access to resources.

But for now, I want to let Abigail zoom us out again. And, why not, let's drop climate change into the mix too. Earlier, Abi talked about how trans people in Britain are very much outside the realm of the rules. So, let's explore that idea.

Abigail Thorn:

As capitalism produces more and more crises, the boundary of, like, who is protected by the rules is going to get smaller and smaller. The wire is shrinking. It's going to keep shrinking because capitalism is entering its biggest crisis, the climate crisis, and it has no way out of that. And it's going to, like, constrict and constrict and constrict until it breaks. That's the nature of unsustainability.

So what governments who represent fossil fuel companies and fossil capitalism have to do is they have to discipline the workforce. They have to say, “Right, okay, no. Go to work. Keep going to work, keep going, keep driving the trucks, keep driving the ships, keep drilling that oil.” And the way that they do this is by cracking down on unions and strikes and workers rights, which we're seeing in the UK. And also they have to crack down on the other side of it too. They have to make sure people are still producing and going to work. But they also have to make sure that the other half of the equation, which is usually women, are still reproducing society.

Which is why we are also seeing crackdowns on women's reproductive rights, limitations on access to abortion, crackdowns on LGBT people, and big crackdowns on protest because they know that society has to keep reproducing itself and in order to do that, people have to keep going to work and people have to keep making babies and having families that grow up for the next generation of workers.

The problem is, you can shoot people to death, but you cannot shoot them to work. And you can shoot people to death, but you cannot shoot them to pregnancy. Well, you can, but I don't think we're quite willing to go that far... yet. At a certain point, the system breaks. So the reason the wire is shrinking is because the state is having to adopt ever more disciplinarian measures to ensure that people keep reproducing society through what Marxist feminists called reproductive labor, and also so that people keep producing and keep going to work. And that's going to keep happening either until we collectively have solidarity and we decide, “You know what, we're going to stop this. We're going to do something else with the economy.” Or until it can't happen anymore.

Hannah Witton:

Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to support the show, you can go to patreon.com/hannahwitton, where you can also find ad-free versions of the show and a bonus behind the scenes episodes and extended cuts. And you can find transcripts and show notes over on our website, doingitpodcast.co.uk

In what ways do you find money, resources, and capitalism impacting your experience of sex, relationships, and gender? I'd love to continue the conversation with you over on Instagram @doingitpodcast.

Next time we're talking about porn.

Billy Lore:

I don't think it is my responsibility as. an erotic creator to make sure all of my porn is perfectly educational. There are things that I play up in porn that I may or may not do in my actual sex life.

Jet Setting Jasmine

I think the word ethical being put on porn has become like the way that we see organic label being put on food. It's not really clear what makes that thing organic or ethical.

Hannah Witton:

This podcast was hosted and co produced by Hannah Witton, produced by Mia Zur-Spiro, and edited and mixed by Anoushka Tate. Episode transcripts, show notes, and social media produced and created by Moog Florin.