On Woodstock 99, Free Britney, & The Way Women Are Always Objects Under Capitalism
No woman can possibly be "liberated" as long as we are still exploited.
“Progressive thought has long cast sexuality and pleasure as stand-ins for emancipation and liberation,” writes Katherine Angel in Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women And Desire In The Age Of Consent. This was the sentence that sparked my revelation of my true feelings of the sex positivity movement; the idea that sex is liberation is yet another distraction from the real problem—capitalism.
Let’s step back a bit. I recently watched some of the Woodstock 99 documentary, including the part where they discuss the role women’s bodies played in the festival and just in media at the time. A lot of it was described as the Girls Gone Wild era—something I was either too young to experience or maybe I wasn’t even born yet, but I remember hearing about it as a kid and I remember it being fuel for my internalized misogyny. I remember thinking of these women not as women—or people—at all. Was anyone thinking of them as people? Well, the documentary talked about the way women’s bodies in that period were merely tools for the media to utilize; they were commodified, used for entertainment and selling products and ideas.
It makes me sad. It made me wonder about the current sex positivity movement, which I’ve been ambivalent about for a long time. That quote by Angel I began this newsletter with opened the door for me to understand exactly what is off about the movement. Being against the sex positivity movement does not mean being against women or sex—it means recognizing the fact that it’s another band-aid over a wound, a wound that can only be healed through the dismantling of capitalism. Because as long as we are under capitalism, there will always be intense power dynamics between men and non-men, and women’s bodies will continue to be seen as a commodity for men to consume, an object for men to enjoy.
This is why we look back at Britney Spears’ career and get upset; she was not liberated. I don’t think a woman in the music industry—or any industry—can truly be liberated. She was a commodity, and her body was the biggest selling point, along with her youth which was often fetishized. Earlier this year, Tavi Gevinson meditated on this in her essay for The Cut that reacted to the Framing Britney Spears Hulu special: “The result is a documentary eager to characterize Spears’s early image as an expression of female power rather than the corporation-sanctioned sexualization of a 16-year-old.”
Female power, female empowerment, female agency—all of these things are just abstract ideas that are frequently weaponized by capitalism and corporations as a guise for something else.
“In recent years, public scrutiny of sexual harassment in the workplace has intensified, with good reason, though it has focused largely on the film and music industries, on the media and political classes,” wrote Angel in another one of her books, Daddy Issues. “Can this renewed scrutiny be usefully read as, among other things, a story of white, middle-class disillusion with the emancipatory promise of work?”
Perhaps we should have known, known that Spears was not liberated as a worker in capitalism, no matter her amount of privilege; known that women’s bodies would symbolize a monetary and social value rather than a path towards “agency”; known that sexual misconduct would run rampant in the media industry. No matter the amount of privilege, social capital, and money the media industry provides people, women are still objects tethered to the system that is designed to give men power over them.
Let’s bring up the common discourse surrounding sex work, especially in the wake of that semi-recent event where OnlyFans temporarily banned porn. In Having and Being Had by Eula Biss—a book I’ve probably cited before—she explores her feelings on the topic. She’s talking to her friend about the ethics of paying a woman for housecleaning, and compares that to sex work: “But if a woman is going to do housecleaning, isn’t it better for her to be paid than for her to do it for free? I rethink this line of argument almost as soon as I speak it. I could also say that prostitution is better than everyday sex, in that a woman is getting paid for something that many women do for free. When it’s good, sex is more pleasurable than housework, but being paid for it doesn’t necessarily make it better. It just makes it work.”
Sex is an intimate, personal thing—something that shouldn’t be commodified. But there are tons of other intimate, personal things that shouldn’t be commodified and are because of capitalism (art, for one, especially art about trauma). What’s funny, I think, is that a majority of people who are anti-sex work are also capitalism-enthusiasts. Where is the logic?
I don’t have the answers, as usual. Neither does Eula Biss. What I do have to say is that sex work has been romanticized to an absurd extent. Men I’ve dated have asked me why I don’t have an OnlyFans. I say: “Why would I?” Why is it assumed that any woman would be comfortable and should want to go into sex work now? People who’ve never considered it before flirt with the idea—even if they don’t need the money. Are we desperate to feel empowered? Are we looking to somehow gain status from a system that has been pushing us down from the beginning? Probably. Sex work won’t provide the liberation we want to feel. No work will.
No work cares about you. Spears was not protected from the hell that her job brought upon her. And why did OnlyFans put a ban on porn? “The short answer is banks,” said the British founder and chief executive of the company. They admit that they do not care about the livelihood of their own workers; they care about money. Sex work should simply not be branded as “empowering oneself as a woman and reclaiming agency” when sex workers are as exploited and mistreated as everyone else.
The anti-sex work argument, though, that doing sex work gives in to misogyny by objectifying oneself is oh so silly. You could say that about women having sex with men at all. We are all objectified under capitalism and there is nothing we can do about that until the system is burned down.
Sexuality and pleasure can never be stand-ins for emancipation and liberation. Sexuality and pleasure are short-lived things; the fight for emancipation and liberation is a long one.