Things that qualify as ‘selling your body’: selling your blood or tissue. Arguably surrogate pregnancy because of the actual physical tissue necessarily lost in the process - blood, placenta etc (but it overlaps with selling one’s labor)
Things that do not count as 'selling your body’: selling your labor or time. Unless you’re comfortable with all labor done with one’s physical body being classed as 'selling your body’.
If you want to reduce sex trafficking and rape, legalizing and unionizing the industry would be a much more functional step.
If you want to reduce the instance of people trading sex for money, you’ll need to dismantle capitalism.
Honestly even if you want to say that sex work is “selling your body” — which, like, it isn’t — that still doesn’t mean clients have the right to purchase it.
I have the right to sell, say, homemade scarves if I want to, but if I decided to not sell to one particular person for some reason, that doesn’t mean that person can demand I do business with them. You can’t go into a Bath and Body Works, start pouring lotion on the ground, and then claim they can’t kick you out because if they have the right to sell lotion then you have the right to buy it and no one can throw you out of the store.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of rights and of sex work. The idea that sex workers can’t refuse their clients and shouldn’t have a right to take some clients but not others is actually something that gets harder to justify if you think of sex work as work.
Also not for nothing, but a lot of people who sell sex aren’t women and a lot of people who purchase sex aren’t men because reality is a more complicated an interesting place than essentialist fantasy would have us believe.
All very true.
I mean… I do worry a little bit about the concept of one’s right to turn away customers? Because, in professions that are legal and regulated, turning away a customer sometimes results in lawsuits, where the seller may have to prove that they didn’t do it for illegal reasons (race, religion, etc).
Whereas when having sex for free, a person can legally stop and back out for any reason, including ones that are shallow or prejudiced– and not allowing that would still seem kinda horrifying when you think about it, no matter how bad the reason is.
There would be some pretty deep issues to figure out, in terms of what right you’d have to revoke consent for sex with a paying customer, before or during the act– and on what grounds, and would the classes “protected” from discrimination be different here?
Still. The fact remains that this would still work better with regulation than without. If your choices are “put up with the customer I can’t stand” or “get threatened with murder and be unable to go to any authorities about it because my job’s illegal in the first place?” Yeah, we can do better than that, no matter what complications we’d have to figure out.