GenZedong

This reads slightly like concern trolling, but I will respond anyway. The issue is important.

I do not assume that everyone reading my comment is a straight man; rather I assume that most people defending sex work will be straight men. Long experience with The Online Left has made me very cynical in this regard; as Deng Xiaoping said, "seek truth from facts," and a whole lot of pro-prostitution rhetoric is eerily similar to arguments incels make. You cannot seriously tell me you've never run into a straight, cismale "leftist" whose "support" for sex workers was ultimately about getting (as someone else in this thread put) a "Revolutionary People's Prostitution Office;" such individuals are a plague in our circles. Genderwise, this thread may be an exception to the general rule -- it is hardly a total exception -- but it does not disprove said rule. Any experience with the internet or (indeed) real-life left will show you that.

But neither are women and queer people automatically immune to this nonsense. Just as you have right-wing trans people like Blaire White, and other women who support MAGA and "redpill" philosophy, so you get plenty of women and queer people on the left who support sexist positions ultimately not in their interests. (I remember, not too fondly, when Merrick DeVille's reinvention of comfort women was a hotly debated topic in leftist forums). The assumption that identity always equals ideology, and that being part of an oppressed minority leads therefore, always and in every case, to a correct interpretation of material reality, is wrong and ignores the existence of false consciousness. But only Marxists-Leninists seem really to talk about such things.

I am perfectly aware that men can be trafficked as well. However, the vast majority of trafficked people are women and girls. To ignore that, or to say that protections for women and girls should not be the main focus of anti-trafficking policy, is to engage in a sort of leftist reskinning of an infamous right-wing talking point: "You spend all this time talking about how Black people are victims of racism in the US, but did you know that white people can also be victims of racially-motivated crimes?" Certainly they can, but the problem is not anywhere near comparable, or anything like so institutionalized. Similarly, to focus on protections for women and girls, from a problem that they disproportionately face, is not in the least to deny them agency.

Lastly, the institutionalization of sex work is far more characteristic of fascist regimes than socialist ones. Stalin, Mao, and Kim Il-Sung abolished prostitution and pornography. Mussolini's Italy was content to regulate the existing the brothel system. The Nazis similarly had military brothels, from which women of "impure blood" were excluded. We know about Imperial Japan and "comfort women", and there have been reports of similar things happening in today's Ukraine. South Korean "democracy activists" have tried to smuggle porn into the DPRK, apparently under the belief that it is a social rot which will help undermine society from within. Are we to believe that these regimes, regressive in every way, were progressive and better than socialist states on this one issue? That seems dubious, to put it mildly.