I WATCHED a recent YouTube interview by social media activist Owen Jones on the scandal of MP Neil Parish viewing porn in the House of Commons and it made me angry. 

An opportunity to ask serious questions about both pornography and misogyny, to present a balanced discussion on their impact on society as a whole and on women who sell sex, was missed. Instead, the show promoted so-called “sex work.” 

The “sex industry” interviewee acknowledged that it is not OK to view porn in public, and while MPs were “enjoying the labour of sex workers,” claimed it was essentially no different from others doing the same. 

At no point in the interview was any serious consideration given to how women might feel at being subjected to males viewing porn in public places. 

Rather than discussing the impact of pornography in wider society, the interview was used to paint a fantasy about prostitution, using pseudo-Marxist jargon about “selling labour power” — a term which working-class women forced into selling sex or trafficked women may well find deeply offensive and humiliating.

Jones’s guest tells us she found office work “humiliating” and “would far rather have a dick in my mouth,” going on to use the facile argument that under capitalism all work is exploitative, so therefore prostitution and porn are no different. 

In fact millions of workers, even while their labour is being exploited by the profit system, do jobs and use skills and abilities of which they are rightly proud, whether they be engineers, NHS workers or others. And even in those areas of work which are regarded as menial, for example, cleaning, we find workers proud of the socially useful contribution they make to society, as we found in the pandemic — their grievance is not with the work but with low pay and bad terms and conditions.  

The logic of this misogynist argument is that jobs designated as “boring and humiliating” are no different to women selling their bodies — an argument that the overwhelming majority of female workers would find repulsive and insulting. 

The truth about prostitution historically is that women are forced into such work by poverty, not choice. Quite rightly, the aim of early socialists was to end such exploitation — no amount of reinventing it as some kind of “cool career choice” will convince any serious person of anything different.

We are entitled to wonder what kind of choice Jones might wish for any young female family members he has. 

In his case no doubt he would want her to have a first-class education, maybe an Oxbridge degree and perhaps even a highly paid career in the media. 

We can be fairly sure he would regard this as preferable to the “work” of his interviewee and her specialism of “anal gang bangs.”

The coming period will see the further impoverishment of working people and some female workers will be forced through necessity, not choice, to take up prostitution. They will do this to feed their kids and not because it was ever the life they wanted to lead. 

Let me tell you about my experiences as a psychiatric nurse and why I despise the one-dimensional, male fantasy view of women being “‘empowered by sex work.”

The prostitutes I worked with were damaged by years of childhood neglect and sexual abuse. These women were let down by successive governments who cut free education, the welfare state, social housing and the wages, terms and conditions of the job roles that could have enabled them to claw their way out of deep poverty. 

Jones sees no links between these issues and prostitution or if he does it’s simply not part of the discussion. Any dissenting view of prostitution based on the grinding reality of women who are trapped in prostitution and don’t feel empowered and liberated will be either dismissed or ignored by the misnamed “sex positive” squad. 

The tens of thousands of women who have been mentally and physically broken by a life of mental and physical abuse integral to prostitution will never be heard on Owen Jones’s platforms. 

The prostituted women who are trafficked or addicted to drugs won’t ever be given a voice in this fantasy world — they are erased, they don’t matter.

It is true pornography has always existed but there was no attempt in this “show” to analyse how it is now so readily available through electronic media and the impact it is having on the consciousness of young people and even children who can access it at the touch of a button, and certainly no discussion about how the degradation of and dominance over women that constitutes the bulk of this material is poisoning even further the human and sexual expectations and relationships of young people. 

Reaction dressed up as radicalism ends up in a defence of exploitation and regressive social relationships.

Any woman who dares to seek out a balanced and honest debate on porn or prostitution is dismissed as an uptight prude by the “sex positive” squad and manipulatively accused of hostility to women forced into the sex trade, rather than the ugly realities of the industry itself. 

But such insults will not stop socialist women doing what they have always done — fight to end the exploitation of our sex and our class.