‘Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self’ a decade on

On the publication of ‘Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self” in Italian, Monica Mazzitelli caught up with the author, Kajsa Ekis Ekman, to discuss the book and what has changed since it was first published.

Monica: I’ve just re-read your book, not only to refresh my memory but also to see if the content has become dated since it was first published. Sadly, I found that nothing much has changed. The discussion remains as toxic as ever with the debate still revolving around the misleading idea that women freely choose to engage in prostitution, which you cover in some detail in the book. But even those who support prostitution acknowledge that a significant proportion of the women involved have been forced into it – if not by individuals, then by circumstances – which begs the question of why so much of the discussion revolves around the small minority whose involvement is truly voluntary.

Kajsa: I wrote the book in 2010, after four years of research. The book has been published in Spanish, English, German, French, and now Italian. I’ve been giving lectures on this issue for 14 years, from Australia to Argentina, and I can tell you the debate looks exactly the same everywhere in the world. This isn’t the case with other issues. If I write about war or geopolitics, for example, the contexts differ vastly from country to country. But prostitution is a global problem, a global industry that exists everywhere.

All countries must deal with this issue, whether they want to or not. Even countries like the Netherlands and Germany, where buying sex and pimping have been legalised, and brothel owners are considered entrepreneurs, they’ve had to handle a slew of social problems. So, this issue continues to be relevant.

As I often say, the distinction between prostitution and trafficking isn’t the interesting question; the real question is, what is prostitution? I define it as sex between two people, one of whom wants it and one who doesn’t. That’s the fundamental premise: if you have two people who want to have sex, they don’t pay each other. If you have two people and neither wants to have sex, they don’t have sex, period.

Prostitution arises when there’s this inequality in desire: one person wants it, and one doesn’t. The one who wants it quite simply pays the one who doesn’t to overcome their reluctance. So, money replaces desire. Therefore, the sex in prostitution can never be voluntary; otherwise, it would be free.

Sex is something we typically have for two reasons. Either because we enjoy it or because we want to have children. In prostitution, the person selling sex gets neither; they just get money instead.

Monica: But what makes this difficult for ordinary people to understand is that liberal feminists, who have no experience of prostitution themselves, argue that prostitution can have a liberating effect for the women who choose it. They somehow imagine prostitution as something akin to being with Richard Gere in Pretty Woman. They create an image that doesn’t exist.

Kajsa: I can’t go into the psychology of people I don’t know, but what we can see is that the sex industry has adopted contemporary arguments in its attempt to become accepted and legalised by society. If we look back 100 years, we find figures like the criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who believed that ‘fallen’ women were necessary to maintain social balance, allowing ordinary women who didn’t want to have sex to avoid it while men could satisfy their ‘needs’ with prostitutes.

Today, such reasoning doesn’t hold up, so the prostitution industry has modernised itself by borrowing feminist arguments from the second-wave women’s movements, twisting them to advocate for prostitution. They argue that women have the right to their sexuality and bodies, the right to work and freedom, the right to decide for themselves. These arguments have been distorted to support prostitution. Governments, lobby groups, and pimp organisations have spread these ideas, often using women involved in prostitution as spokespeople in the media to speak positively about prostitution in exchange for help leaving it. This has confused many women, leading them to accept the idea of ‘voluntary’ prostitution. It’s an industry that generates and manages an incredible amount of money.

Monica: In this way, women who oppose prostitution are made to appear as if they are blaming the women who are victims of it, rather than criticising the system itself.

Kajsa: As I say in the book, these arguments in favour of prostitution are chameleons, in the sense that they target different groups in society and present prostitution from various angles. To the second-wave feminist, they speak about a woman’s right to control her body. To the LGBTQ movement, they advocate for sexual freedom, presenting involvement in prostitution as a sexual orientation, a sexual minority. To the labour movement, they approach it from a labour rights and union perspective – despite the fact that there are no real unions involved. To conservatives, they argue that it’s about two consenting adults who have the right to do what they want in a bedroom without anyone else interfering.

It’s interesting that these arguments can appear together, even though they completely contradict each other: prostitution can’t be both a sexual orientation and a job, it can’t be both a job that should be regulated by law and a private matter that should be settled in the bedroom. They constantly shift between these different discourses to draw in as many groups as possible to support this.

What’s changed since I wrote the book is that a large movement of prostitution survivors has emerged worldwide, with many women testifying about what they’ve been through. They participate in anthologies and conferences, stating that sex is not work but violence, oppression, and trauma, and they refuse to be called sex workers.

Monica: Yes, it’s so unbelievable to talk about unionisation when there’s always drug and alcohol abuse, health risks, diseases, rapes, mental illness, depression, dissociation, suicide, and nearly 70% of the women involved suffer from PTSD or CPTSD. What kind of union would allow all this? It would be unthinkable.

Kajsa: Exactly! The mortality rate among women involved in prostitution is 40 times higher than among women outside of it. It’s actually safer for a woman to be a homeless drug addict than to be involved in prostitution. When I did my research for the book, I looked into these so-called ‘unions’ and found that they were actually just interest and lobby organisations.

Monica: In your book, you offer a Marxist interpretation of the sex and surrogacy industries. Can you talk about that?

Kajsa: I think the theoretical analysis in the book is, in a way, a meeting between psychology and Marxism, because there’s a concept that addresses the same issue: In Marxism, it’s called reification or alienation, and in psychology, it’s called dissociation, but essentially it describes the same process.

In a capitalist society, there’s a constant effort to find areas untouched by capitalism to begin commercialising them. There’s nothing deeper and more fundamental to humanity than sex and reproduction. When you talk about commercialising intimate human aspects, for once, Marxists, Catholics, Muslims, feminists, and conservatives can find themselves on the same side, as I recently pointed out at a conference in Rome. There’s a deep-seated aversion to buying sex or children; these things must be kept outside the market because they cause such extreme harm to individuals. You’re not selling a product, but a part of yourself.

Monica: Can you explain how dissociation works?

Kajsa: Höigård and Finstad, two Norwegian researchers, worked on this in the 1990s, and since then, research has continued to identify defence mechanisms that virtually everyone in prostitution uses. These include things like downplaying the time, using alcohol and drugs, adopting a different name, keeping certain body parts off-limits during prostitution, essentially trying to compartmentalize: ‘This part I give to the customer, and this part I keep for myself.’ The goal is to not fully be there.

This is the exact opposite of what you want and experience during a pleasurable sexual encounter. The problem is that while these defence mechanisms protect you in the moment, they have harmful consequences, including difficulty maintaining a sense of wholeness with your body.

Monica: Is there any argument in favour of prostitution?

Kajsa: No, there isn’t. Instead, there are many arguments against it: it creates inequality between men and women, women become objectified, suffer physical and mental harm, are traumatised, and die. Human trafficking becomes embedded on all fronts. The only ones who get anything ‘positive’ out of it are the men who get to have sex with women and girls who don’t want them.

What would happen if we abolished prostitution? Some argue that women who prostitute themselves would lose their means of income. That’s a false argument: selling sex isn’t something you start doing at 14 and continue until you’re 65 with a pension. Women are thrown out by the industry itself, often by the time they’re 30.

Monica: I think many people can understand this when it comes to prostitution. But when it comes to surrogacy, it’s easier to pinkwash it. Why does your book address both issues?

Kajsa: While I was writing the book on prostitution, articles began appearing in the Swedish press about legalising surrogacy, using the same arguments that were used for the prostitution industry. I realised it was the other side of the coin: prostitution is sex without reproduction, and surrogacy is reproduction without sex, but in both cases, women’s bodies are being exploited.

And there is another factor, namely the child, who hasn’t chosen to never meet their mother, which denies a fundamental right in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, that children have the right to their origins.

I was recently in Rome discussing the Casablanca Declaration, where I met Olivia Maurel, a woman who had been born through surrogacy, and she believed it should be banned, for the child’s sake. When you grow up and find out that your parents aren’t your real parents, but that you were born from a woman who had to give you up, you feel like a commodity. The identity issues this woman testified about were enormous.

We aren’t like turtles that lay eggs on a beach and walk away; we are pregnant for a long time, and we also care for the child for an extremely long time—they need extensive care. Evolution has prepared us for this by giving us all these feelings to bond with our children, and during pregnancy, we prepare for this. Treating women as baby factories creates two traumas: one in the woman and one in the child.

The buyers haven’t prepared for having a child in the same way the pregnant woman has, and there are so many cases where it has turned out that those who ordered the child are unsuitable in all possible ways—there are no regulations, it’s just a matter of money.

Monica: It feels like all of this is happening because we’ve accepted this narcissistic view of society where every desire can be satisfied if you can afford it.

Kajsa: Yes. There’s been a shift in language use: a desire becomes a demand, which becomes an entitlement, and then becomes a human right. But a desire isn’t a human right; you shouldn’t be able to buy someone else’s child. This language use also dehumanizes the mother when she isn’t called ‘mother’ but ‘surrogate’, a term the media has adopted when talking about, for example, Kim Kardashian or Paris Hilton. They bought their children, but it’s said that they “had” a child via “surrogate.” But they haven’t had a child at all—another woman has had it, they’ve just bought it. As I said, it’s a dehumanization of the mother.

There’s also an asymmetry in the narrative about how those who buy surrogacy are described in the media—their feelings, their longing, their loss—but nothing is written about the mother’s feelings for the child she has to give up, as if she were just a robot doing a job. Or she’s presented as some altruistic woman who can fulfil someone else’s dream, without pointing out that the person buying surrogacy is someone who is willing to let another woman go through all the physical risks and pain involved in being pregnant and giving birth, and then take that child away from her. You have to wonder if a person with so little empathy is suitable to care for a child.