Work like any other?
Drawing lines in the sand

A few days ago, France’s Assemblee Nationale overwhelmingly approved a bill to criminalize the purchase – and decriminalize the sale – of sex work. “Thank you for having looked at prostitution as it really is and not as we imagine it to be,” Najat Vallaud-Belkacem said when the votes were counted. Thank you, in other words, for not buying into the rhetoric of free choice that stipulates that sex work is work like any other.

Is sex work, work like any other? The question resonates with others raised insistently over the last several decades in relation to women’s reproductive functions, in other words – motherhood. The ‘wages for housework’ movement of the 1970s largely failed to achieve its goals. But it left its mark in the notion that the caretaking activities women perform for their own families ought to be recorded in economic statistics. In this perspective, housework (understood broadly, to include care) is work like any other.

Many feminists opposed wages for housework seeing it as a strategy that would marginalize women within the domestic sphere, sealing their fate as low status employees of an isolating and too often inequitable institution. Despite the promise of a paycheck, wages for housework was, for many, the very opposite of emancipation. Yet all would have agreed that wages for housework is a bedrock of fairness when it is performed by some one other than the woman in whose house it takes place.

More recently, the market for reproductive surrogacy has brought with it intense debates over the transformation of gestation into a form remunerated labor. Again, feminists are divided. On one side are those who see in the sale of pregnancy services the dehumanizing reduction of a woman to her womb – a move that repeats and fossilizes oppressive views of women as reproductive machines. On the other side are those who argue that this view negates the agency of the women engaged in the exchange. If a woman wants to sell her reproductive services, they claim, it is oppressive and demeaning to negate her right to do so. After all, gestation is work like any other.

And for years, we have been debating sex work. Here too, some feminists maintain that sex work reinforces long-standing objectifications of women as servants of male pleasure. (In this view, men who sell sex are ‘feminized’ by assuming the position of women as satisfiers of male desire.) Putting pleasure up for sale by subjecting one’s body and the expression of desire to another’s demands, sex work digs into the most private aspects of a person’s way of being, transforming self-expression into contractual obligation. Moreover, the notion of sex work demeans intimacy itself: love, of which desire and sex are manifestations, should not be a matter for commerce. Others claim, again, that choice is choice: if a woman (or man) chooses to sell sexual services, who is to judge that choice illegitimate?

There is no easy resolution to any of these issues.  But it is important to understand the connections among these various debates, and why the stakes are so high. As ‘work,’ sex, childbearing, or care are legitimate objects of exchange: the worker ‘owns’ her capacity to labor and may freely exchange it. Moreover, as a ‘worker,’ she is entitled to compensation and to the particular forms of protection that are associated with labor, including the right to refuse to enter into any particular transaction.  But, as a worker, she is also subject to contractual regulation. That means, for example, that when a childcare arrangement ends – as may occur when a marriage falls apart – the ‘worker’ loses her relationship with the child. It means that when a pregnancy is over, the child who is born ‘belongs’ to the person who has purchased her. It means that when a long-term relationship with a particular sexual client ends, no claim for sustenance can be advanced. Currently, for those who choose not to view these activities through a contractual lens, family relations provide an alternative legal framework. In that framework, when a marriage falls apart, a mother maintains her claim to a relationship with her child; when a child is born, the person who has given birth is his mother and any change in her status, such as is entailed in adoption, begins from this basic premise; when a long-term sexual relationship ends, the partners may still have obligations to one another. From a policy perspective, each framework raises its own set of quandaries. If sex work is work like any other, should unemployment agencies direct their clients to take it up as a compulsory alternative to welfare? Can a reluctant sex worker be compelled to pay breach if she has accepted an agreement that she now refuses to perform? If a wife has sex with her husband, should a court enforce her claim to a salary for her services? If gestation defines ‘maternal’ status, should paid ‘gestational carriers’ be able to exercise maternal rights over the children to whom they give birth? If child-care is a maternal function characterized by a significant affective dimension, can a fired nanny claim visitation or even custodial rights over the children for whom she has cared?

As these questions show, neither framework is fully adequate and neither framework is applicable in all contexts. U.S. sociologist Viviana Zelizer demonstrated years ago that even in the supposedly ‘separate sphere’ of marriage, where non-contractual relations are deemed to prevail, exchange persists. Wives and husbands expect to receive and give ‘compensation’ (not always, but sometimes, in monetary form) for sex and childbearing, care and housework. At the same time, sex workers draw lines between those from whom they will accept money for sex and those from whom they will not. For sex workers, not all sex is work.  But as the means by which they earn their wages, it is. 

The inadequacy of the neat dichotomies that oppose work to family and contract to status helps to explain why the last few decades have witnessed major struggles to introduce elements characteristic of ‘contract’ relations into ‘status’ based ones, and vice-versa. Rape in marriage is no longer a legal oxymoron although cases are still being heard in which men raise ‘marital privilege’ defenses against women’s assertions of a right to consent to sexual relations even after they are married. And, in some countries at least, pre-nuptial agreements are now legally enforced.  At the same time, in many contexts, paternity suits have become easier to press while international organizations have called for such suits to be generally available.  The common law rule, based on the Roman maxim, pater est quem nuptiam demonstrant that long protected men from the claims of children born outside of marriage – and from those of their mothers – has been eroded.

The attractiveness of the contract model is that it revolves around choice, where the status model revolves around obligation.  Moreover, in both socialist and market-oriented discourses, ‘work’ situates an activity in the sphere of exchange relations, endowing it with a significance that non-transactional activities cannot claim. In opposition, theories of dignity seek to preserve areas of non-commodification: love, sex, bodily and psychological integrity. But they, too, assign payment for functions deemed work. Unremunerated work is work whose dignity is denied. So, the key question regards where the line between work and being is drawn. And that feels like drawing lines in the sand.  What can be categorized as ‘work’ and why being so categorized has such significant implications is associated with the status of ‘work’ in our societies. In the words of classical liberalism, a man may alienate his labor but not his ‘whole person.’ But when the subject who engages in the sale is a woman – or has assumed the structural position that has been characteristic of women – and the object of the exchange relates to her as a mother our conceptual and legal frameworks show their limits.  Yes, we need to debate how sex work should be regulated and the rights of gestational surrogates. But the fundamental question we are discussing is:  how should we view, and what kind of rights and obligations should we associate with what have conventionally been understood as women’s reproductive functions?