Unherd held a recent debate between sex-industry worker Aella and reactionary feminist Louise Perry… By focusing on prostitution, the debate elucidates the extreme ends of the argument that sex positivity is liberating for women. But sex positivity adversely affects a far broader segment of the population than the small percentage of women who are engaged explicitly in sex for pay. The commodification of women’s bodies and sex has made its way into seemingly mundane aspects of life, and is now pervasive in our culture, to varying negative effects for women and men alike.
The way young women use TikTok, for example, shows how girls commodify themselves in return for the currency of the attention economy, “likes,” to deleterious effect. Even seemingly innocuous trends like cottagecore on Instagram, a way of depicting a curated humble pastoral existence, can trap women in a curation cycle wherein life is built around capturable images, not the other way around.
Contemporary dating is another arena in which women commodify themselves, accepting that they are explicitly selling a package in a marketplace, dehumanizing the sacred uniqueness of personhood. This commodification of women is most profitable for young, fertile women, and the end result is that as women age out of that stage they either desperately alter their bodies to retain a hint of maidenhood, or they pass into social irrelevance. If you are not able to be used as a commodity for men’s pleasure then you are worthless in this marketplace. Read more…
