Being and Being Bought Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self

by Ekman, Kajsa Ekis

• ISBN13: 9781922964205
• ISBN10: 1922964204
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2025-04-01
• Publisher: Spinifex Press

Summary

In 1998, Sweden passed ground-breaking legislation criminalizing the purchase of sexual services which sought to curb demand and support women 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 aren't trade unions. Groups for prostituted women are simultaneously groups for brothel owners. And prostitution is always presented from a woman's point of view. The men who buy sex are left out. Drawing on Marxist and feminist analyses, Ekis Ekman argues that the Self must be split from the body to make it possible to sell your body without selling yourself. The body becomes sex. Sex becomes a service. The story of the sex worker says: the Split Self is not only possible, it is the 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 child trafficking? 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.

Author Biography

Kajsa Ekis Ekman was born in Stockholm in 1980. She is an author and a critic at the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter and a member of the editorial collective of the anarchist magazine Brand. She has a Master’ s Degree in Literature from Sö dertö rn University. Her first book Being and Being Bought was published in Swedish in 2010 by Leopard Fö rlag. Her second book, Debt as a Weapon: The euro crisis seen from Athens was published in 2013 . In 2023, her book On the Meaning of Sex: Thoughts about the New Definition of Women, translated by Kristina Mä ki was published by Spinifex Press. Kajsa Ekis Ekman is a writer for the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter and a member of the editorial collective of the anarchist magazine Brand. She is the founder of the network Feminists against Surrogacy and the climate action group Klimax.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Preface, 2025 Preface, 2013 PART I Prostitution Chapter One: The Story of the Sex Worker or How Prostitution Became the World’ s 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 World’ s Oldest Profession: Regulation The Drainage Model Chapter Two: An Industry is Born– 1970 to present The 1970s: The Sex Industry Expands— and Gets Into Trouble The 1980s: Holland Takes Up the Thread The 1990s: HIV/AIDS— Money Comes Through The New Millennium: ‘ Unions for Sex Workers’ The International Union of Sex Workers— Pimps Les Putes/STRASS— The Men The International Committee of the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe — The Researchers Á mbit Dó na— The Social Workers The Industry False Faç ades Rhetoric from the Left— Money from the Right Power Transformed— The 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” Reification— When Sexuality becomes a Commodity The Struggle for the Woman The Buyer’ s 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 Friend’ s 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 won’ t 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