"alright, darlin'?"

This post was going to be about bitching, but life was the proverbial and got in the way, in the form of new work. I have recently started volunteering at a Women's Centre which deals, amongst others, with prostitutes - but now I come to think of it, maybe this won't be too far off the original topic after all.

Prostitution is, undeniably, a feminist issue. But that's where it gets bitchy, isn't it? I have always been of the opinion that we should all try and stick to the dictionary definition of feminism as much as possible; however we may each interpret "advocacy of the rights of women (based on the theory of equality of the sexes)", to quote the OED, any feminist position must be justified in reference to this most basic premise.

A lot of the time, in the West at least, we do, and most arguments you hear about feminism follow the tawdry "feminism means hating men"/"no it doesn't, it means wanting equality" binary. If you are lucky, your interlocutor might accept this fact; if you are not, they will most likely bang on about what feminism "really" means, unbeknownst to either actual real live feminists or indeed the Denizens of Dictionaries. But what of feminist factionism?

Let's say we're all reasonable dictionary-abiding feminists who don't want to round up All Teh Menz and shoot them in the penis. Surely we should, by and large, be able to agree on general principles? Not when it comes to sex, we can't. I am not about to essay a treatise on the entire prostitution debate - for one, it's been done a million times before, and for another, I really need to pack for a festival tomorrow - but rather a plea for peace concerning an issue that has played increasingly on my mind in recent weeks.

For many of us, female and male, sex work is an unpalatable concept. But whether one finds it immoral or simply unimaginable, the fact remains that many women do it. Whether they're Happy Hookers™, Crack Whores™ or the "single moms" moronically featured on many a T-shirt, they do it. And while they're doing it, they risk abuse from their punters to the public and everyone in between. So what do we do about it?

And this is where it gets bitchy again. There is a sizeable and vocal mainstream feminist movement against sex work - and I can perfectly see why. Popular culture already sees (or perhaps rather, resolutely depicts) women as a sexual commodity. Women sell everything from cars to deodorants to ourselves, and the everyday effects of this range from the dumb to the disturbing; from endless media commentary on Michelle Obama's arms to my flatmate being followed home by the man who asked, "How much? 50? Come on, you and me, how much?" when we were 19. In fact, Natalie wasn't a prostitute. She was wearning jeans and Converse (you try unlacing them in hurry!) and a jumper, she was walking briskly through a safe part of town nowhere near a red light district, and she must have repeated, "No, I'm not for sale", a hundred times.

What freaked her out the most was that this was not some macho-muppet showing off in front of his friends or trying to intimidate her, but a smart, otherwise polite, man in his 20s genuinely trying to broker a mutually agreeable fee. You can't help feeling in situations like that, that if so many other bloody women weren't for sale, men wouldn't assume you were. Certainly my main problem with the sex industry is not its commodity, but its connotations; what I dislike most about the idea of such transactions is not the (already somewhat alienating) concept of one human being selling their body to another, but the fact that it is so utterly culturally one-sided. Intellectually, I know that prostitution is about much more than "letting the side down", but emotionally, in our current society, that is how I feel. In that sense, prostitution does indeed impinge on any progress towards the "rights of women" as a whole.

But what about the rights of women, to puerilely plagiarise Pegg, as a hole? A woman's rights are inseparable from women's rights, and sometime the twain must meet. A prostitute lets down the side by perpetuating the perception that women are sexual commodities; a campaigner against her local brothel lets down the side by forcing its staff out onto the street, where they run a tenfold higher risk of attack. Ideologically, they are both right; practically, they are both right and wrong.

I personally have no desire (rather the attavistic opposite) to prostitute myself; nor do I believe that it is always or even often a genuine career choice (especially if you happen to be a genuine crack-whore looking to fund your next rock). But nevertheless, the broader, louder, better-funded campaign for Women's rights with a capital "w" cannot afford to... ride? tramp? - sorry - roughshod over women's rights in lower-caste lower-case. It is not enough to dislike prostitution; what we should dislike is the culture that creates it, that empowers it, that requires it. Like countless other feminists, I would love to live in a world where no woman ever had to rent her body out to her landlord in lieu of rent - but that can only happen in a world in which the very wheeze never crosses the landlord's mind. If prostitution is to end, it must do so organically, as part of wider (more important) social change; try to stamp it out, and you're only trampling its agents.

If it is not, I can only hope it will evolve, with society, greater gender equality (it has always struck me as somewhat anti-feminist to campaign for equality through an assumption that equality can never exist in some areas, such as sex work). In any case, there are no easy answers - yet, at least. Meaningful change will take time, perhaps longer than I will live to see. But if we are to make any progress, for Women capitalised and disenfranchised, we must work around, if not across, our differences. For sex workers' and non-sex-workers' sakes alike - as long as they still get it on, can't we all just get along?