NEW PREFACE
In 1998, Sweden passed ground-breaking legislation that criminalized the purchase of sexual services which sought to curb demand and support women to exiting the sex industry. Grounded in the reality of the violence and abuse inherent in prostitution and reeling from the death of a friend to prostitution in Spain Kajsa Ekis Ekman exposes the many lies in the sex work scenario: Trade unions arent trade unions. Groups for prostituted women are simultaneously groups for brothel owners. And prostitution is always presented as a characteristic of the woman. The men who buy sex are left out.
Drawing on Marxist and feminist analysis, Ekis Ekman argues that the Self is split from the body which makes it possible to sell your body without selling yourself. The body become sex. Sex becomes a service. The story of the sex worker says: the Split Self is not only possible, it is ideal.
Turning to the practice of surrogate motherhood, Kajsa Ekis Ekman identifies the same components: that the woman is neither connected to her own body nor to the child she grows in her body and gives birth to. Surrogacy becomes an extended form of prostitution. In this capitalist creation story, the parent is the one who pays. The product sold is not sex but a baby. Ekis Ekman asks: why should this not be called baby trade?
This brilliant exposé is written with a razor sharp intellect and disarming wit and will make us look at prostitution and surrogacy and the parallels between them in a new way.
Arvustused
It may seem outrageous to many of the proponents of commercial surrogacy that we might compare the position of the prostitute to that of the surrogate, but Ekman does an effective job of explaining the very real parallels.
Grazyna Zajdow, Arena Magazine
Acknowledgments
Preface, 2025
Preface, 2013
PART I Prostitution
Chapter One: The Story of the Sex Worker or How Prostitution Became the
Worlds Most Modern Profession
The Sex Worker and the Feminist
Sexual Orientation
The Victim and the Subject
A Slippery Slope: From the Independent Escort
to Human Trafficking
and Children
The Invulnerable Person
The Narrator
The Cult of the Whore
The Worlds Oldest Profession: Regulation
The Drainage Model
Chapter Two: An Industry is Born1970 to present
The 1970s: The Sex Industry Expandsand Gets Into Trouble
The 1980s: Holland Takes Up the Thread
The 1990s: HIV/AIDSMoney Comes Through
The New Millennium: Unions for Sex Workers
The International Union of Sex WorkersPimps
Les Putes/STRASSThe Men
The International Committee of the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe The
Researchers
Ámbit DónaThe Social Workers
The Industry
False Façades
Rhetoric from the LeftMoney from the Right
Power TransformedThe Legacy of 1968
Chapter Three: The Self and the Commodity in the Sex Industry
My body is not my Self
Sex is not the body
ReificationWhen Sexuality becomes a Commodity
The Struggle for the Woman
The Buyers Dilemma
The Postmodern Story: A False Dialectic
The Way Out
PART II Surrogate Motherhood
Chapter Four: The Reality of Surrogacy
Background
The Buyers and the Bearers of the Bought
Chapter Five: The Story of the Happy Breeder
Happy Families
A Revolutionary Act
The Feminist Arguments
Prostitution
Child Trafficking
Sold with Fatal Relativism
Turning the Law of Demand and Supply into a Human Right
On the Term Surrogate Mother
The Capitalist Creation Myth
For a Friends Sake About Altruistic Surrogacy
Chapter Six: Inside the Surrogacy Industry
Uterus Pimps About the Agencies
The Most Surrogacy-Friendly Courts in the World
If I do feel sad after the birth, I wont show it
The Ultimate Reification
The Virgin Mary in the Marketplace
Women who Change their Minds: I am not a surrogate; I am a mother
Bibliography
Index
Stockholm born, Kajsa Ekis Ekman writes for the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter and is on the editorial collective of the anarchist magazine Brand. She has an MA in Literature from Södertörn University and is author of Skulden - eurokrisen sedd från Aten (Leopard Förlag 2013). She has founded the network delete comma, Feminists Against Surrogacy and the climate action group, Klimax.
