Make the Grade or Hear the Laughter

Abstract

Up to the present time, female prostitution has been labelled among feminist gender relation theorists and advocates as one of the bleakest symptoms of male domination and thus violence against women in the history of mankind. It stands as one of the most striking, enduring examples of female victimhood and male perpetration. Ongoing discussions hardly ever allow for any differentiation between
forms of prostitution, such as prostitution due to dire poverty, the abuse of love relations, malicious seduction, forced labour, or personal lifestyle choices. It is all the more surprising that the well-known labour market analyst and lecturer at the London School of Economics and Social Sciences, Catherine Hakim, proposes a total departure from this feminist position, which seemed to be written in stone. As a self-proclaimed feminist, she introduces a veraciously feminist model that proposes that women of all social classes and formal education use their erotic capital, i.e., selling sexual favours, as a basic means of primary money making, status acquisition, social advancement, and a means to finally establish a society in which equality can be achieved and women can rise to the very top. This sexualized model of professional relationships requires abandoning all cultural traditions, such as the development of emotions, self-respect and privacy, submitting everything to mechanisms of the market. If
men were to respond to this market approach to intimate relations, then it would follow that they could do precisely what most of them deplore: demand sex from women for privileges that men grant. It would be permissible to do what feminism traditionally blames men for practicing.