I disagree. No matter how you try to dress it up so that it makes sense to YOU, the fact is there are many women not only willing but who DESIRE jobs that pretty much sells sexual services, or plays on their sexuality. There ARE women who enjoy the attention their beauty brings. Does this mean enjoying the attention equates to consenting of sex or anything physical? Hell no, it means they enjoy the attention.

As a college student there are SO many jobs you could get-most are not high paying (for MEN OR WOMEN) that do not require you to show skin or use sexuality. But those jobs are typically for those on the summa cum or magna cum laude track with perfect academic history and a future brighter than a diamond under a flourescent lights.

I kind of hate this argument.

You have a choice between starving and getting a job. You might get a job because you're WILLING to work, even if you'd much rather relax at home all day. It doesn't mean that you're a slave.

Similarly, you can choose between working at McDonald's for minimum wage or at a more dangerous job. A lot of construction work has a terrifying mortality rate, but the men who do the work earn more than a Fast Food worker.

So if you CHOOSE to take the construction job because you have kids to support, are you really making a choice?

If you're a pretty girl who cuts hair and you know you can probably get higher tips working at a place where your hotness is a selling point, you might just do it. The women at this particular place are already skilled workers, meaning they could probably find work elsewhere if they liked. Instead, they choose to use what nature gave them to make a little extra money.

I'm a pro-domme. I took the job because I was having trouble finding work elsewhere. I knew that my family would support me if I couldn't pay my rent, but that just wasn't an option I wanted to take. Am I poor little victim too?

Reminds me of the discussions I try to have with my father sometimes about societal influences v. choices. It is so easy to seemingly negate choice because of a lack of options. And yeah, I do see your point, definitely. It does happen. Some people are fortunate to have so many options available to them while others are only given a few. Often it is the work of privilege. For example, at least a recent one I remember in the Feministing community, when a woman was discussion working as a waitress at (I think, though I may be wrong) a strip joint. She didn't really want to, per say, but that was her only option for a job at the moment and she needed the money. And I remember there were comments about wait for another job. Which is great, if you are privileged to be able to do that. Like people who tell others to quit their job if their boss is a sexist pig. It really isn't an option for some people. So yeah, it is a rock and a hard place.

On that note, everyone's experiences are going to be different. There are women out there forced to use their bodies to survive, while many others choose that life. It is the kind of thing you hear about sex work. Not all sex workers are young children groomed by pimps who rape them or women trafficked from other countries nor are all sex workers women who chose the profession willingly and joyfully. It is important to talk about women who are not given options and it is important to look at how choice (or lack there of) does affect women and how they choose to live. The abortion thing was a great example. Women choose back alley abortions and dangerous abortions when they aren't given the choice for safe abortions because that is their only option in many cases.

But I think think women should get to choose whether they are victims or not. You cannot know a person's reasons (because they are often extremely complicated) for hir choices. But it is important to have this discussion. Society plays a VERY important role in everyone's lives, and often what we consider "choices" I feel are things that society has taught us to want. But then where do we draw the line between our own actions and societal programming? And women should always be respected for the choices they do make, no matter how little autonomy you feel they may have. Many people do not want to feel like they are a victim in life.

Everyone should be able to check their privilege before they make comments (like "can't rape the willing") but one should also remember that not everyone can be clumped into nice groupings. Everyone is gonna be different and like different things. We should work towards a world where if a woman wants to work in a hair salon that uses her body she can and there won't be any doubt that it was her choice alone and not a choice made solely for survival sake.

I am not able to follow your logic and I agree with the two previous posters. A woman in college has just as many money making opportunities as a man in college does. Very few of these job opportunities involve anything vaguely sexual or demeaning.

I am also curious as to how you jump to the conclusion that lacking the "economic autonomies" to make real decisions could effect a woman's decision to sell her body. As I and others have said before, just because a woman doesn't have a lot of money doesn't mean that she will have to strip or cut hair in the case you brought up.

I also noticed in the section of your article that read "then why are we still blind when it comes to women's lack of economic autonomies?", you seem to have excluded men from the equation. There are in fact just as many men who lack economic autonomies just as much as women do. I'm not sure how you can say you are for equality among the genders if you can completely exclude men from that statement.

I also had concerns about your statement concerning the heteronormative attitudes in our society. Because if you have not noticed there are far more heterosexual couples than homosexual couples.

I'm also fairly sure that a woman's boyfriend would not force her to have sex at knife point.

I think that you are actually saying that women are not able to make their own decisions. Which is most defiantly not the case.

I think we need to bring deception into the equation for why some women desire to take these jobs. Society tells women they are worth the most when they are young and hot. Society tells women their sexiness is their best asset. They make their choice to desire a line of work that shows off their best asset. However, their choice has been altered by the LIE they have been told their whole lives about how their best asset is their sex appeal, not their ability to do anything else.

This does not mean all women are making an uninformed bad choice when they choose to use their body to make money. But I think for a lot of women, even just women who dress sexy on a daily basis or even rarely, showing off your body and getting pretty is a choice that's been altered by the lie that society has projected onto them.

ok.
1) I find it extremely disturbing when rape is compared to economic hardships and the difficult *choices* made because of them. I see it over and over again, used in efforts to somehow protect the "disadvantaged", and it only minimizes the extreme offense that is the act of rape and only serves to paint the "disadvantaged" as weak and pliable.

2) I find it disturbing that you cite abortion as some sort of comparison. The battle over the uterus is NO different that the battle over any other part of the woman. These are parts of people covered under the idea of personal autonomy. Pro-lifers use this argument against abortion, that abortion should be illegal because women only choose it out of economic hardship. If they could afford the baby, and could afford to not work, they would not murder their unborn. They use this argument today, in post Roe v Wade society, as a reason to further restrict access to safe abortions.

3) There is no such thing as "economic autonomy" unless you are born rich and stay rich or you somehow have shelter and food provided. Outside of the womb, this does not exist. If you are lucky to have it, you can lose it in the blink of an eye. There is only personal autonomy - the freedom to choose.

4) The people who need to check privilege are those who treat the "disadvantaged woman" as other - so much so that anyone here, on this thread, is assumed to be sipping tea off a silver spoon if they have a different perception of the problem. There seems to be some assumption that the "poor" never have internet access - they can't figure out how to get library cards and can't figure out how to get on the internet from the computers there and can't figure out how to post on websites. But they can, I promise you.

5) Cosmetologists have a marketable skill. If they choose to exploit men who are slaves to the myth of beauty, that is their choice. The exploitation of the oppressor by the other is what people really HATE about the power of autonomous personhood, especially that of the feminine.

Of course, that's just my opinion, but what do I know.

The same applies for some women who enter into industries that use their bodies as a selling point. While those jobs may not seem "desirable," some women are "willing" to take those jobs based on the limited choices they have.

It's totes sexist that some of the hundreds of millions of people who have to take jobs they can get based on limited options are women. If it weren't for patriarchy, women could always get exactly the jobs they wanted, like menz do. What's not sexist is for Marc to rule on whether these women "desire" or merely "will" to have these jobs.

I read it again, and the point seems to be that since rape is horrible hot chicks cutting hair is bad, by the transitive property of smug self-righteousness.

Two words: Hobson's choice.