r/antisexwork

Just watched this Netflix biopic (based on real events — Gangubai Kothewali, ran Kamathipura in Mumbai in the 50s-60s) and I need to vent because it's infuriating in a very specific way: it's brutal and honest for most of its runtime, then betrays everything it built.

Opening: a teenage girl is sold into a brothel by the man she eloped with, for the equivalent of a few dollars. The film doesn't "dramatize" it (i mean with like sad/eery music etc) , doesn't soften it, doesn't explain it to you, it just shows it happening, which somehow makes it more impactful.

There's a scene where a "client" tortures her so badly she ends up hospitalized with dozens of stitches. The second she recovers, he comes back, demands her specifically, wants to do it again, smiling the whole time. The brothel madam, who sees Gangubai as a threat, basically finds it very convenient and si smiling about that. Nobody protects her. Not the law, not the police, only a personal connection to a local mafia boss who shows up and beats the guy in the street, to death.

She become the brothel madam bc the last one die.

Later she runs for local leadership of the district against another woman who is actively against letting woman in prostitution's children go to school, she wants to keep them in the trade. Gangubai fights to get them out.

She also free some teenager girls who would rather die than being here. She also stop violent men from coming in the brothel.

....And then the third act happens.

She becomes a public figure, gets invited by a progressist / civil right association to speak about woman in prostitution rights ( you must understand that back then in India up to 11 pr cent of woman were in the sex trade), meets the Prime Minister, and the film suddenly starts mouthing the most tired pro-prostitution lobby lines.

First: "legalize prostitution." Except in the system the film just spent two hours showing us, clients are already legal. Pimps are already legal. Brothels are already legal. The only people who can be arrested are the women, many of whom, like her, were literally sold into it with zero consent. So what she's actually asking for isn't "legalize prostitution," it's "stop criminalizing the victims." But that's not what she says. She says "legalize prostitution," full stop, as if the demand-side of this isn't already completely unregulated and untouched.

Second: in the same scene, she also says women get arrested while clients walk away free, which is basically an abolitionist argument. She has the right diagnosis in her mouth (the system punishes victims, not abusers) and somehow lands on the wrong prescription (more legal protection for the system itself, not criminal consequences for the men who buy and sell).

Third: "without us the streets would be full of rape." This is the oldest patriarchal myth in the book, men have uncontrollable urges, some women need to be sacrificed to protect the "good" ones, and somehow that's framed as a feminist talking point. It's not. It's the same logic that got her trafficked in the first place, just repackaged as activism.

Fourth, and this one might be the most enraging: she says "I'm proud to be a prostitute." At this point in the story she isn't a prostitute anymore — she's a brothel madam, running ~200 women, who got invited to speak as an activist. She's not speaking from the position she's claiming. It's performative, and it works on the crowd in the film exactly the way it works on real audiences today whenever a brothel owner or pimp dresses up as a " woman in prostitution rights advocate."

The film had two hours of material to make a genuinely radical, coherent point: stop punishing the victims, start punishing the men who buy and sell them. Instead it ends with her legitimizing the exact system that destroyed her, applauded by a crowd, scored like a triumph.

Sure, it's a biopic so they weren't going to rewrite history, but they put words in her mouth that nothing actually proves she said, just by what they tought she said, and every biopic owes its subject some critical distance. Here, there is not.

About what message you're sending: a film that spends two hours showing trafficking, torture, and zero institutional protection, then ends on 'legalize prostitution' and 'we keep wives chaste,' delivered as triumph, scored as a win, applauded by a crowd. Whatever she actually said decades ago, that's the message a 2022 film chose to send to a modern audience!

Devastating, well-made, and then it face-plants exactly where it mattered most. Anyone else watch this and feel the same whiplash?

PS : There's also a smaller moment that gets buried under the bigger 'legalize prostitution' speech, but honestly it might say more: post-election, right before her famous 'fear no one, not your clients, not your pimps, not the police, not the state, not even their fathers' line, she tells the women to fully satisfy their clients, just make sure you're well paid for it. That's not a message about rights or refusal, it's labor management advice from a brothel boss optimizing output. She's not saying you can say no, she's saying negotiate a better rate while doing exactly what's expected of you. And it's delivered seconds before a line about fearing no one, which makes the contradiction almost invisible: obey the client fully in one breath, don't fear him in the next. It's the same third-act incoherence, just smuggled in earlier and easier to miss.

The "patriarchy captive defeatist" pattern in pro-prostitution arguments

The pattern: the underlying patriarchal premise (men have sexual needs that require an outlet, the disparity in sexual access between men and women is a natural condition to manage rather than a structure to dismantle) is never actually questioned. It's accepted as the fixed starting point. Then a whole "progressive" policy framework gets built on top of that premise: harm reduction, labor rights, decriminalization, destigmatization. And yes here we know it doesn't reduce harm, it increases it, but that's for another day.

All of it operating entirely inside a frame that was never interrogated in the first place.

I've started calling this patriarchy-captive defeatism.

Captive, because the ideology is never the thing being challenged, it's the unquestioned floor everyone builds on. Defeatist, because the implicit logic is always some version of "this will exist no matter what, so the only realistic move is to manage it better," dressed up as pragmatism instead of what it actually is: the least ambitious political position available.

You see this exact move everywhere once you notice it:

"Without prostituted women, the streets would be full of rape": defeatism about male behavior, presented as a feminist safety argument. It assumes male sexual violence is an unmanageable constant that needs an outlet, rather than something that can actually be reduced (which, by the way, the data on buyer behavior doesn't even support, criminalizing buyers correlates with lower demand, not displaced rape rates).

"Criminalizing buyers pushes them into dangerous/desperate situations": again, men's comfort and access is the subject of concern, framed as a safety issue, while the actual woman being bought disappears from the sentence entirely.

"It's just a natural disparity in access between men and women when it comes to sex": said almost verbatim in arguments I've debunked recently, and it's the premise stated outright instead of implied. It treats women's bodies as a resource that needs distributing to meet "demand," like it's a supply chain problem instead of a structure of violence.

What's frustrating is how often this gets coded as the enlightened, harm-reduction position, while actual abolition, which asks "why does this demand exist and how do we end it instead of supplying it," gets coded as prudish, unrealistic, or carceral.

If any of you follow feminist discourse on tiktok you might've come across "Niles"... he is this incredibly liberal feminist who is very deadset on portraying radical feminism as this right-wing anti-intellectual school of thought.

I don't keep up with him much at all, but recently he made a video in favour of sex-work by claiming that coercive consent can still be consent. He basically argued nearly everything work-field that requires our consent, obtains it through coercion. Moreover it was just very deadset on re-writing what consent means, claiming coercion and consent are not 2 ends of the spectrum but both exist in a gray area.

I, myself align very well with leftist economic models and its integration with radical feminism. But I see such claim regarding consent or prostitution so frequently across leftist or marxist "feminist" places that it really gets me wondering how the hell are they still walking around with the feminist title. It's this sentiment of completely disregarding the fundemental pillars of consent and claiming it to be this very philosophical, subjective, personal matter. I really don't understand how giving validity to coercion or abusive dynamics from this lense is suppose to be feminist.

And I really really can't fathom the ignorance required to pretend as if sex is something that is something that can exist without ENTHUSIASTIC consent from both parties. It is quite literally a right-wing rhetoric that women can/should have sex without enthusiastic consent, and that consent is still considered valid if it is coerced.

I saw many commenters also somehow justifying intoxicated consent, and normalising non-enthusiastic consent. It's fascinating how they claim to be sex-positive feminists while supporting the most basic patriarchal framework for sex or consent.

Moreover they are desenisitizing people to sex so far that viewing it as work or a social currency or means of living instead of genuine female pleasure. I'm confused how the hell is this feminist, when defining female sexuality as work and social currency has always been the at the core of misogyny, patriarchy and all conservative societies. Feminism wants to redefine sex to accomodate female pleasure outside of the patriarchal sex-framework...I genuinely have no idea what the hell marxist/leftists are doing when they claim to be sex-positive just to end up pseudo-intellectualizing their way into religious/patriarchal sex standards.

Creating such frameworks do nothing for women and only continues to support rape culture and prioritizing male sexual-gratification over womens safety. Genuinely what the fuck else are you doing if not supporting rape-culture by diluting consent to such a "it can be anything and everything!" matter.

It get's even more awful when you realise marxist feminists don't even consider patriarchy to be the cause of our oppression.

A new strip club has opened up for FIFA. There are already two strip clubs within two blocks. This new one has strippers stripping OUTSIDE THE CLUB. On the sidewalk. Every streetpost in the city (no exaggeration) has posters advertising two for one lap dances for the other strip club, which now has women wearing thongs and bras flirting with men walking by on the sidewalk. It seriously makes me want to die. Many of the posters are already vandalized with others voicing their condemnation of the lewd ads. This is taking women back in time to the 80s, when prostitutes roamed the streets in the area. I was naïvely thinking the city is going in a more progressive direction. No, we are going the way of Montreal.

this is a rant/vent post which idk if it’s allowed but i’m gonna anyways. when i was 18 i had a roommate who an OF star pretty much. she told me if i made one i would make stupid money. i’m very impressionable so i did, and i did make stupid amounts of money. i do not blame her for telling me about it or saying those things to me or blame her for me making the choice to do it AT ALL. i am my own person at the end of the day. and i did it, stupid too. i didn’t hide my name, i did it on my public accounts. i did it so i would get the most traction and money. i was not thinking about the future. to say the least there’s hundreds of photos of me out there now. if you do a google search you could find them. i stopped OF maybe about a year into it or a little less. i started getting threats, i started having panic attacks, i couldn’t sleep at night knowing what i’ve done, that everyone can see me, have access to me in a way. i stopped wanting to go out, out of fear people would see and “recognize” me. after i quit the feelings didn’t go away, because the things you put out, don’t just go away obviously. even though i was “done” it was still out there, it is still out there. for years i dealt with the anxiety, dirty feeling, depression, and just guilt. i felt nobody will ever truly love me or understand that’s a sort of my past i wish never happened.
but this is why i have started to be against SW so much. i experienced it. and maybe im biased because of my experience, maybe other girls don’t feel that. but i feel like nobody would choose that route if it weren’t for the money. i wish young girls, like me, did not have access to post on those sites or that world. at 18 your frontal lobe isn’t even developed, you can’t even drink alcohol or smoke. but you can sell your body online? its disgusting. I will never have a big career because i would never pass a background check for any serious job. i would love to be a teacher for kids, but that obviously won’t be happening lol. and i understand that, no kid should be able to look up their teacher and find that. I am at a place now (5 years later) where i have accepted what happened. it still makes me feel gross when i think about it, but i don’t think about it constantly. i don’t hide inside, i don’t lose sleep over it at night, i am not depressed over it anymore. i wish i could tell every young girl to not do it. the money is never worth what it does to your mental.