Sublime

By consenting to these terms, Katia upheld a deeply unequal system in which girls circulated between men on men’s terms, while generating surplus value for them in the form of money, social ties, and status. This system is what anthropologist Gayle Rubin referred to, in her now famous 1975 essay, as “the traffic in women.” Rubin had sought to addre

Given that in the labor market women are concentrated in service-sector jobs involving reproductive labor, it can be argued that women have traded unpaid housework for their families for paid housework in the marketplace.

Not only do women across the world produce the workers that keep the global economy in motion. Starting in the early ’90s there has been a leap in female migration from the Global South to the North, where they provide an increasing percentage of the workforce employed in the service sector and domestic labor.

As a result, dominant factions of both those streams are increasingly united in a new project: to normalize once taboo forms of sex within an expanded zone of state regulation, and in a capital-friendly guise that encourages individualism, domesticity, and commodity consumption.

Often, you’ll see this billed as “choice” or as women pursuing personal happiness because the language of feminism has been neatly co-opted by a strain of peculiarly American individualism.

But all women should have free access to school, for as long as studying is a commodity we have to pay for, or a step in the “job hunt,” our relation to intellectual work cannot be a liberating experience.

There is hardly a politician who dares not profess eternal devotion to women’s rights, and wisely so, since what they have in mind is our “right to work,” for our cheap labor is a true cornucopia for the system.