Capitalism And Prostitution

1084 Words5 Pages

Humans are commodities, we as humans don’t like to think of ourselves as something available for purchase, but we can’t deny that our lives hold value and sometimes others can put a price on our lives; whether it is our time or physical body. While our value can be placed in our time and attention given to corporations and their commercialist structure, our value can also be placed in our bodies. Prostitution is just one way, probably one of the first concepts that pops into our head when examining the price of a person, in which people’s bodies can be sold, not only as a service, but as something that is physically done to our bodies. Individuals could also be paid to partake in a medical experiment or receive a Dunkin’ Donuts gift card when …show more content…

However, “fostering the separation of sexuality from procreation, capitalism has created conditions that allow some men and women to organize a personal life around their erotic/emotional attraction to their own sex;” much like with other advancements in society, when one isn’t constantly thinking of survival, it is usually then that critical thinking begins (D’Emilio 1993, 470). Capitalism gave homosexual relationships the ability to be a possibility, but this behavior is often shunned by the rest of society. Capitalism and the intersectionality of homosexual relationships, simply focusing on the relationship between two women, is significantly more difficult for them to survive in a patriarchal society due to a lack of sustainable jobs offered to women (D’Emilio 1993; Seidman 2015, …show more content…

A person feels alienated from their labors, when they don’t feel satisfied or fulfilled by the labors they put into production. A prostitute may be forced into her situation, either by a pimp or for some other desperation, this lack of proper consent means that many prostitutes have been raped and will be raped repeatedly, not only do they experience this trauma, but many are also arrested where prostitution is illegal; this may be demonstrated as an epitome of alienation of labor (Monto and Julka 2003, 2). Karl Marx was very critical of the exploitation of workers, which is one of the causes of alienation of labor, sex workers (prostitutes) are clearly being exploited by their pimps and customers (Fitzgerald and Grossman 2018, 73). If women are expected to produce children by society and are unable to, they may also feel a sense of alienation of labor. They continue to try, as many may believe of themselves as broken women. It is a social construction that every woman should have children, it is simply what a capitalist society expects of them, to labor in order to produce more laborers. The term for child birthing is also called ‘labor,’ defining it as an incredible effort that one should take pride