The interaction between marketplace and morals is clear in the Libertarian world: let the market decide. Free-marketism also encourages a simple three-value classification of the world: consumer, entrepreneur, and raw material. The right way to live is make sure you belong to class 1 or 2, not class 3 (Libertarians are profoundly anti-slavery). It is a Libertarian ethic, then, which informs current attitudes towards the sex trade among lesbian feminists: women can resolve all questions about the industry by making sure that they are either entrepreneurs (hence the recent disproportionate emphasis on the independent hooker, who represents a tiny fraction of prostitutes in the US and the world) or consumers (hence the proliferation of lesbian sex shows and clubs, Chippendales calendars for straight women, etc.) There's a strong disinclination to face up to women's more usual role in the trade: raw, expendable material.
On the other hand, one could define the sex industry as a whole as
corrupt, and unacceptable in a feminist vision of the world. This
debate is entirely analogous to the debate over nuclear power: there
are those who believe that incompetent and dishonest management, corrupt
and complicit regulatory agencies, technological obstacles, and bad
labour relations can all be cleaned up and replaced with good practice
- and then the industry will work. There are others who believe that
nuclear energy is a wrong technological path altogether, a mistake:
an excessively risky and expensive technology with enormous hidden
costs in human life and environmental damage, a silly and wasteful
approach to matters that would be better addressed by a completely
different philosophy
.
The alarmist rhetoric of scarcity is heard among both the capitalist investors in various polluting industries, and the friends of the sex trade. Nuclear developers characteristically predict the end of the world's oil and coal reserves (while the oil and coal companies are fervently denying the same); they cite the instability of the oil-rich Middle East as a motivation to achieve oil independence; they belittle and dismiss all alternative technologies, and assert that the nuclear industry offers the only alternative to a rapid breakdown of society under electrical famine.
Meanwhile the US oil industry, carefully avoiding the subject of dwindling reserves of a finite resource, cites repeated Middle Eastern crises as the rationale for opening up protected areas of the US to unrestricted drilling - the only alternative to a continuing sacrifice of our boys for foreign oil. Pro-porn activists predict that any restriction on the sale of any sexual media will lead us directly to Orwell's 1984, without passing Go and without (which I think is the real point) collecting $200. In each case, alarmist rhetoric is used to convince the public that the human or environmental costs of this particular capitalist enterprise are a tragic necessity - like the destruction of lab animals in unnecessary experiments, always sanctified as sacrifice in the published results. (We'll return later to First Amendment alarmism and its uses.)
In no case is a policy of moderation considered, a possibility of modifying our expectations or desires. In each case the citizen targeted by this rhetoric is encouraged to accept gluttonous overconsumption as a normal and necessary condition of life. The idea that we might reconsider our appetite for sexual entertainment in light of its costs, or alter our wasteful energy use patterns, is never mentioned. It's unthinkable, unspeakable. The US capitalist philosophy cannot come to grips with limitation: it's based on a model of boundless resource and infinite profit.
One concern of mine is the impact of the free-market everything has a price mentality on all of us, and its implications for feminists. The end result is that we no longer believe in anything priceless , anything whose value transcends the values of the marketplace. Most people would still agree that a human life is beyond price, that no one should be able to buy a license to shoot someone else. But those same people accept risk analyses by hazardous industries which assess the risk of fatal exposure, for example, at less than one in 100,000. If the exposed population is 200,000 - and sometimes it is - then the implication is pretty clear: not necessarily, but very possibly, one particular person is being condemned to fatal exposure because 1/100,000 is an acceptable risk level and does not justify the expenditure of a couple of million dollars to redesign a facility or eliminate the use of a chemical or process. Which means that this unknown person's life is worth less than a couple of million dollars.
In some risk assessments, sums lower than $2,000,000 are at stake. My point is that we are already accepting the notion of a reasonable price for a human life - not my life or your life, of course, but the life of someone else whose name we don't know in advance. We are daily encouraged to accept widespread, possibly irreversible, possibly fatal environmental damage to our planet as the cost of doing business . The market economy and the market philosophy have prevailed; the lives and well-being of women and children are the cost of doing the sex business, and many women who still call themselves feminists are assessing this as an acceptable cost for a free market and free speech.
It seems to me that we would be better off if we still acknowledged a category of things and qualities that are priceless, irreplaceable, not compensable. We would certainly be better off if one of those things was the health and integrity of every woman's body. We would be better off if we did not accept and believe that a man with enough money can pay a woman to submit to absolutely anything he wants to do to her, and as long as he pays up afterwards it's all right . We would be better off if we did not accept and endorse the ethic of prostitution, which is the free-market ethic, which is the basis of laissez-faire capitalism - which may turn out to be the most expensive and short-sighted ethic in history.