Prostitution and the sexual contract — The Unmoved Feminist

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The language around prostitution has shifted markedly over the past two decades. In media commentary and policy documents we are now more likely to see ‘sex work’, ‘clients’ and ‘services’ than ‘prostitution’ or ‘male buyers’. Online platforms present it as one more strand of the gig economy, organised through apps and personal branding. At the same time, governments and NGOs talk about decriminalisation or legalisation as progressive reforms, framing prostitution primarily as a matter of workplace conditions and individual choice.

From a second‑wave, materialist perspective, what looks new is largely a change in packaging. The underlying structure – organised male entitlement to women’s bodies – has not altered. Feminists writing in the 1970s and 1980s treated prostitution not as a marginal subculture but as part of the basic infrastructure of patriarchy: a system through which men, as a class, buy sexual access to women and girls, as a class.

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What second‑wave feminism saw in prostitution

That analysis began from how the system actually looks on the ground. Across jurisdictions and legal models, the vast majority of buyers are male, while those who are bought are overwhelmingly female or otherwise socially positioned as women and girls. Kathleen Barry documented this in detail in Female Sexual Slavery (1979) – the violence, the trauma, the premature death among women in prostitution – and treated these as features of the system, not as a string of unfortunate accidents. Women in prostitution are disproportionately poor, Indigenous, migrant or otherwise marginalised, while the men who buy are typically better resourced and far less exposed to violence and stigma. That asymmetry is not incidental; it reflects something structural about how power and vulnerability are distributed.

The sexual contract behind the scenes

Carole Pateman’s account of the sexual contract helps explain why this matters politically. Standard political theory tells us that modern states rest on a social contract among free and equal individuals who agree to live under shared laws. Pateman pointed out that this story leaves something out. Behind the social contract that grants civil rights to “individuals” sits a prior agreement among men which secures their political right over women – a right to our bodies, labour and obedience. Modern patriarchy, in her terms, is fraternal: it is the shared claim of men, as a class, to organised access to women.

That claim is not expressed only in explicit rules about wives and daughters. It is encoded in institutions that are made to look like neutral agreements between equals. Marriage is one of those institutions. Even where individual marriages are loving and mutually supportive, they take shape against a legal and cultural background in which wives were once absorbed into their husbands’ identity, unpaid caring work is still presumed to be women’s responsibility, and sexual availability is treated as part of the marital bargain.

Prostitution is another. Here the contract is stark. What is bought and sold is not simply time or skill, but the right to use a woman’s body sexually in specified ways. This is why second‑wave feminists resisted attempts to assimilate prostitution to ordinary service work. The harm is not only that conditions are often unsafe or poorly paid, though both are true. It lies in the institutionalisation of male entitlement itself: the idea that it is normal and acceptable for men to purchase women’s sexual use.

Once such a market exists, it does not remain self‑contained. Andrea Dworkin argued that prostitution and pornography express the same logic in different registers – that both normalise male sexual access to women as a class. Men who never personally buy sex still live in a culture where that purchase is normalised: in pornography, in strip clubs, in brothels, through online platforms. That normalisation reinforces a broader expectation that sex is something women provide and men receive, whether inside marriage, in casual encounters, or through direct purchase. Entitlement learned in one context spills into others.

At the same time, law and policy often treat prostitution contracts as straightforward evidence of free choice. Legalisation schemes focus on licensing brothels, issuing regulations, and ensuring that tax is paid. Decriminalisation models emphasise removing criminal penalties from those selling sex, but may stop short of confronting male demand. In both approaches, the fact that a contract exists is taken to settle the question of consent.

From contracts to sex class

A sexual‑contract analysis reverses this. The problem is not the absence of contracts; it is that contracts mask the inequalities on which they rest. A woman may enter prostitution in the context of poverty, colonisation, childhood abuse or limited alternatives; the man who buys is almost never in the same position. The document describing their exchange presents them as equal parties, but it silently reproduces the old arrangement: men’s sex‑right, women’s sexual availability.

Thinking in terms of sex class sharpens the picture. Men, taken as a group, occupy the roles that set the contours of the prostitution system: they dominate parliaments that draft the laws, police forces that enforce them, courts that interpret them, and corporations that profit from hosting and advertising prostitution online. Women, taken as a group, are the class from which sexual access is drawn, with particular groups of women – especially Indigenous women, migrant women and women in poverty – concentrated in the most dangerous and exploitative parts of the trade. To name this is not to deny any individual woman’s agency, but to acknowledge that the menu of ‘choices’ is structured in advance by sex, class, race and history.

From within this framework, the slogan ‘sex work is work’ takes on a different meaning. If the central problem were simply the absence of labour standards, then the obvious solution would be better regulation: occupational health and safety rules, unionisation, anti‑discrimination protections. Measures that reduce immediate harm for women currently in prostitution are important, and we support them where they genuinely improve women’s safety. But they do not address the more basic question: should there be a market in women’s bodies at all?

The second‑wave answer, which we share, is no. Prostitution is one of the ways the sexual contract is renewed and stabilised. It is not a neutral form of work that can be cleansed by paperwork. Attempts to rebrand it as ordinary labour risk entrenching the structure they claim to reform, by presenting male sexual entitlement as just another category of consumer demand.

Why this matters for our advocacy

This understanding shapes how we approach contemporary debates. When we argue against full legalisation of prostitution and support models that hold male buyers, pimps and brothel‑owners to account, we are not engaging in moral panic; we are recognising that demand is the engine of the system and that buyers act from a structurally privileged position. When we defend sex‑based protections and rights and female‑only spaces in law and policy, we are insisting that there must be parts of social life where the sexual contract does not operate – refuges, shelters, prisons, change rooms and sport where women are not required to navigate around male demand. When we address trafficking, surrogacy and the erosion of sex as a legal category, we are tracing how the same contract is being extended and disguised in new forms.

Prostitution, in other words, is not a side issue. It is a clear window into how patriarchy organises access to our bodies through law, markets and culture – and into what is at stake when we are told that women’s bodies are just another commodity to be bought, regulated and sold.

Further reading

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