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Sex Workers
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Leah Platt, graduate student in economics
at Harvard, refers to the moral dilemmas of prostitution
in a talk entitled "Working Girls: Are Prostitutes Economic
Agents?" When prostitution was dubbed the oldest profession
in the nineteenth century, says Platt, it was done with a nod and
a wink. Sex was considered a private matter, intimate and personal,
while work was a public affair, considered communal and civic. Platt
states that even though feminists have rethought the meaning of work and sex,
there is still a problem with the idea that prostitution might be
a profession. Prostitutes are either imagined as the abject victims
of a patriarchal system, which is inherently violent and oppressive
to women, or seen as rugged individualists, "urban cowboys"
with a certain resourcefulness and fearlessness.
However, missing from both sides of this theoretical debate is an
understanding of the everyday experiences of women who support themselves
by selling sex. Platt says it raises the question
of why, as a society, we have exempted prostitution from the category
of work and, in doing so, removed the basic protections offered by
organized labor and governmental recognition. Platt concludes that
to define prostitution as anything other than a job is
to leave prostitutes outside of our social network and the basic labor
protections that it provides. |
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