The Blind Spot: What Our #MeToo Society is Overlooking About Consent

What would your reaction be if the CEO of a company told his female employees they needed to have sex with him in order to get a raise?  

How about if the casting director of a film told auditioning actresses that they must have sex with him to get the part?  

You’d likely be quick to condemn the actions of these individuals. As would most people in today’s society.  

Especially since the #MeToo movement, most people intuitively understand that money or employment opportunities should not be used to pressure people into accepting unwanted sex. We understand that sexual consent is a very serious, delicate thing, which must be given totally freely. If someone doesn’t want sex, it is wrong to use other means to persuade them into having sex.  

Yet despite this being broadly understood, there is one domain in which our #MeToo society forgets this truth: Prostitution.  

Often, the same people who would vehemently censure the CEO or the casting director in the aforementioned scenarios are also keen to approve of prostitution, painting it as “sex work,” “a regular job,” “empowering to women,” and the like.  

Do you see the contradiction?  

The very nature of prostitution is that sex buyers use money to persuade prostituted individuals into accepting unwanted sex. If the sex was wanted, no money would be required.

Why is prostitution the lone domain in which our society approves of pressuring people into unwanted sex in this manner?  

Now to be clear, the argument here is not that it is always wrong to obtain a person’s consent, in the generic sense, through money. People are paid all the time to do things they wouldn’t do for free; most of us wouldn’t go to work every day if we weren’t paid. So that isn’t what we’re saying. Rather, we’re saying that sexual consent is much more sensitive than other forms of consent and it must be handled with especial care. 

The current gold standard for sexual consent is “enthusiastic consent.” What this means is, it is not sufficient for someone to reluctantly concede to sex; they have to genuinely and enthusiastically want it.

However, the concept of enthusiastic consent is utterly meaningless in prostitution. Once again: if the person genuinely, enthusiastically wanted sex, the sex buyer would not have to pay them to have it.

As successful as the #MeToo movement has been in helping more people understand and care about consent, prostituted persons are consistently overlooked.

NCOSE is committed to changing this. We are committed to holding firm to the truth that sexual consent can’t be bought. 

Are you with us?  

ACTION: Help Expose The Blind Spot! 

Help people see that authentic sexual consent cannot exist within prostitution. Start a conversation with a friend, and/or share one of the below tweets: