New Belgian law is the logical conclusion equity and inclusion
The decriminalization and legitimation of prostitution (i.e., “sex work) has been a hobby horse of progressive activist groups for some time. Feminists have been pushing it for countries like South Africa in the wake of decolonization as an avenue for racial and gender “empowerment.” The same has been packaged as a means of protecting women, if you can believe it.
Until recently, the horseshoe theory of moral liberation and moral tyranny were not yet fully recognized. We are now beginning to witness the logical conclusions of the sexual revolution materializing. Or, put differently, feminism cannibalizing. Left unchecked, it is sure to eat the rest of us too.
Following the prevailing theories of our sexual constitution, as Scott Yenor calls it, the validation of “sex workers,” to become legitimate, must succumb to other progressions in the quest for unalloyed equality and choice, namely, the erosion the right of refusal. How can we all be equal if some are free to refusal us? Why should other respectable professions be subjected to strict standards of inclusivity and not prostitutes?
A new Belgian law, championed by the Belgium Union of Sex Workers, has provided a “labor contract” for prostitutes. This law, characterized by the union as an “historic step in the battle for sex workers’ rights” will afford prostitutes health insurance, pensions, maternity leave, holidays, and unemployment benefits. The cost of becoming “employees” with all the trappings of legitimate employment? Their bosses, like any other profession, can act on lackluster performance.
Put bluntly, the law enables pimps to punish their “employees” via government mediator if they refuse sex more than 10 times in any given six-month period. Prostitutes must clock in just like anyone else and pimps get some kind of guarantee of return on their investment.
This sort of cold, immoral treatment is exactly what the “compulsory feminism” has been asking for. If all walks of life are legitimate then we should treat them all the same, right? If prostitutes get normal employee benefits, then why shouldn’t they be treated like normal employees?
Never mind that this amounts to the government legally and literally forcing people to have sex, a scenario that would have been dismissed as dystopian fiction only five years ago. But this is what happens when liberty is exchanged for licentiousness and when the cult of equality and pluralism governs. As shocking as it is, it really shouldn’t surprise us.
Nor should the apparent movement toward lowering the age of consent—in Italy and Germany it sits at 14—and incrementally decriminalizing statutory rape, normalizing pedophilia, or the legalization of polyamory surprise us. In France, incest is legal so long as the relative is 18.
If all intercourse between any (and all) partners is morally equal, then why should any preference for or combination of the same be outlawed?
The bare ethic of choice will not hold things together for long. The combination of normalizing deviant sexuality, on demand pornography, professionalizing the sex trade, and prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion will inevitably yield the erosion of choice as a defense against any of it. The analogy between race and sex is already planted. What is to stop forceable sex on the basis of the same? Within this paradigm, why would denying a transgender woman your bed be any different that turning away a black man from your restaurant?
The absurd analogy is already there. The gay lobby has been profiting from it for years, and Belgum’s introduction of forceable sex shows that the logical leap is not so big. And even someone who checks all the equity boxes like Jillian Michels will not be safe. Child Protective Services can already take your child for non-affirmation of gender insanity.
Presumably, DEI offices to ensure diversity in hiring in Belgum’s prostitution industry are not too far behind. One can only imagine what will happen then. There’s a possible future wherein refusing sex from anyone for the wrong reasons is criminalized. If “stirring up hatred” via speech is punishable in Scotland, why would denying someone the most (allegedly) liberatory act of self-actualization be different? Sounds like a hate crime.
Can sacramental liberalism really tolerate moral neanderthals refusing the advances of a prostitute, whatever their appearance or gender? Why should only the “sex workers” carry this burden?
You will be free, so free that you cannot refuse the exercise of your freedom. That’s the message of the perpetual sexual revolution. It will not stop until all fully embrace their freedom. But people should start noticing that the chains of such license (so-called freedom) are forged from colder iron than the ones they began melting down decades ago.
The Atlantic Ocean will not offer insulation from the trends described above. Things are already in motion. Just last year, Maine became the first state to decriminalize prostitution. Earlier this year, the Biden DOJ sued Tennessee under the Americans with Disabilities Act for penalizing prostitutes who knowingly spread HIV. So, yes, it could happen here.
Until we reform our incumbent sexual constitution—a gynocritic one—it probably will happen here. The flattening and relativizing of our sexual roles in pursuit of “equality” almost guarantees all these progressions.
Absent patriarchal cultural presumptions, women and children will be vulnerable to all manner of predations so that women, and the perverse men who capitalize off our current arrangement, can achieve maximal self-actualization.
But that’s just the cultural side. Law is a teacher, and it has taught much. The Civil Rights constitution has effectively outlawed prior ways of being, essentially mandating feminism and its progeny. Remember that it was workplace discrimination law that served as Kimberle Crenshaw’s initial context for the development of intersectionality. And recall further that it is Crenshaw’s brainchild that was cited in amicus briefs for the Bostock case. These things are connected.
It may not have been foreseeable in the 1960s, whatever Justice Gorsuch imagines, but if we cannot discriminate in any regard on the basis of sex then forced sex as a condition of employment is a necessary consequence, at least of certain “professions”—the one’s feminists tell us are “liberating” for women. And if biological sex is a moot point as a matter of law, then so too will be the rest of the natural parameters to sexual activity, including age, relations, and number of partners.
Until we become comfortable with being an inequitable society, inconsiderate of outcomes and impact, we cannot hope to correct course on this and other fronts. We must, in this sense, become again a discriminatory society—as any self-respecting society must necessarily be—which includes being discriminatory about how we are discriminatory. Feminists and gay rights activists constantly exploit Americans by attaching their own assertions of “equality” to race. The analogy is constantly hung over our heads, effecting policy paralysis. The same happens with immigration unto equally insane results.
There is a very simple solution to this. Don’t play the game. David Azerrad’s superb essay, “Race and the Conservative Conscience,” provides a roadmap.
First, you must realize that the “accusation of racism, however unfounded, is their most powerful political weapon.” That’s why intersectionality was such an ingenious invention, one that ultimately saved the race critics from extinction. Therein nothing is morally separable. This is why, if you do not become resilient against all accusations of inequity you will be vulnerable to all of them. It is why we cannot consider resistance to the sexual revolution without reevaluating our posture toward race and racism.
Second, there is no reason to “accept the Left’s central piety [or pieties] as our own.” “We must therefore reject the idea that American politics is a competition to show who can better help blacks and who can denounce racism more loudly.” We could add that American politics is not a competition to be maximally inclusive, to conform to demands of disaffected, maladjusted women, or to be as multicultural as possible.
The right’s objective cannot be to outdo the left on equity and inclusion. We cannot win that contest and when it is tried, it comes off cringe. Just consider the utter state of the Republican National Convention this week. An ethnically diverse porn star and a prayer to a Sikh demon were featured prominently. Is this supposed to be a sign of progress?
Alternatively, Azerrad instructs pursuing policy goals for the common good, intentionally shunning leftist race consciousness, thereby neutralizing the “Left’s moral advantage by refusing to bow before the altar of antiracism.” Necessary to this goal is the willingness to “shrug off accusations of racism,” recognizing them for what they are, viz., cudgels for keeping the right defensive and unconfident.
Because politics for the left simply is an eternal struggle against misogyny and racism, enemies will be manufactured in perpetuity. And the left’s ruling class has appointed themselves the “ultimate arbiters of all racial [and otherwise] controversies,” as Azerrad puts it. That’s why the equity lexicon constantly changes so that, like fashion, the commoners can’t keep up.
Third, we must operate on a plain of true justice, one not measured by equity, inclusion, and parity in representation. That is to say, we must reject the left’s moral framework. “Pathological pity”—something more condescending and unnaturally paternalistic than what feminists eradicated—for both minorities and women must end. Equal outcomes must no longer control policy, and natural hierarchies of performance and rule must be accepted. Justice must be opposed for the sake of justice.
This game described above is designed for us to lose. We cannot play it. Many liberals simply want to freeze the sexual revolution at a certain wave of feminism circa 1990. Things don’t work that way. Even Bill Maher, while always insufferable, is now a backward bigot. Robespierre was always going to be a casualty of the revolution.
Instead, we should return to both a vision of impartial justice and of law and custom conformed to nature (and nature’s God). But this requires first developing thick skin, becoming immune to charges of inequity. Let justice be done, though the heavens fall. If we cannot do this, then we have no defense against what is coming, and no right to complain about it.
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So exactly what kinds of racial discrimination will you permit?