Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self

This was a terrific book--I read it in one sitting because it was so riveting! Ekman is able to cut through all the "crap" about surrogates feeling so blessed about being used, and prostitutes being plucky entrepreneurs. Her incisive analysis is like a breath of fresh air. She writes, "Why this fear of calling someone a victim? Because if there are no victims, there can be no perpetrators." Bingo.

Best deconstruction of the ‘sex worker’-ideology, you’ll ever read. Clearheaded, intelligent, thorough and absolutely brilliant. Definitely a must read antidote to all the postmodern, neofeminist, neoliberal nonsense. Kajsa Ekman is a star!

A thoughtful and informed analysis of prostitution and surrogacy. An essential contribution to this debate, it goes against the predominant conclusions in today's liberal culture.

This should be a must-read in all women's studies courses.

This is a must-read for those who want to get beyond simplistic narratives of "empowerment" and "choice" in relation to prostitution and surrogacy. Accessible, lucid, and powerful.

" It’s just another way of arranging relations between men and women and if we’re talking about sexuality I don’t think we’ll ever have positive or egalitarian sexual relationships between men and women as long as prostitution exists and is prevalent in this society. What prostitution does to men who pay for sex to keep them in a lie. I mean, these men they don’t even know what to do in bed — they don’t know how to satisfy a women and they don’t understand women’s bodies because the women they are having sex with are paid to tell them that they’re the best, that they’re this super lover. So he’s paying her then coming home and doing the same thing to his wife and she’s like, “umm, no…” and he just thinks she’s boring and prudish or that there’s something wrong with her. So he will never learn the truth about how to do things in bed — it just perpetuates a kind of lie.It also makes women in prostitution conform to a specific idea of what a woman “supposed” to be like in bed. It isn’t about both people in the prostitution contract, it’s about establishing a relationship where sex is about what men want — the man is the buyer so he will get what he wants. It’s not about satisfying her. If you’re a real feminist and if you actually want women to enjoy sex, I don’t understand how you can defend an institution that is all about renouncing any kind of desire that women have and only satisfying his desires."

This book will probably receive a lot of backlash from those who embrace the rhetoric of "choice" that Ekman calmly and rationally dismantles. She demonstrates through solid fact-based argument that both prostitution and surrogacy are exploitive forces which erode women's human rights, and further that these phenomena have, in true Orwellian fashion, have been cynically rebranded as "progress".A much needed treatise and a must-read.

This book is without a doubt one of the most important work regarding prostitution and pro-woman I have ever come across. Swedish writer Kajsa is a sane and talented voice in a society that is rapidly going more and more insane. This book is a must read for anyone that is interested in radical politics.

My own work tries to capture the larger, evolutionary, biological, and historical patterns that are trying to explain the sort of society that is emerging today, two issues of which (though by no means the only issues) are the push to normalize prostitution (and the hyper-sexualization of society) as well as the promotion of surrogacy, in what many radical feminists and postmodernists shamelessly admit is about eliminating the nuclear family; both these issues are directly tackled in Kajsa Ekis Ekman's very good book 'Being and Being Bought'.Aldous Huxley (an elite insider) knew what he was talking about when he predicted a world (In Brave New World) where sex would be all that's on peoples minds, and close human relationships were a thing of the past. The LGBTQ movement is a push in that direction, with an intention to graft onto this movement, as the 'shifting baseline' of peoples values and principles change, prostitution as a noble and valiant 'rebellion' against Judeo-Christian 'patriarchy' (mainstream postmodern informed leftist thought always seems to have Judeochristian values as their unconscious nemesis) and along with that, the promotion of surrogacy, which besides the immorality of its being the next part of human experience in line for commodification, has the extra bonus of it being an epigenetically incoherent thing to do to an infant i.e. the genetic mismatch between mother, placenta, and the fetus, is bound to create unhealthy children (although this is not yet politically correct to acknowledge, despite all the facts converging to this point); at a psychological level, it also likely that the mother probably hasn't bonded very deeply with her "rentee", and post-birth, the infant will not get the epigenetic benefits of the oxytocin, antibodies, and other highly calibrated biochemistry designed for the creature that has evolved within the 'surrogate' mother (an oxymoron if there ever was one). The fact of epigenetic control of fetal development by the system it evolves within, and obvious dangers of separation, is a return to the premodern era of sending your children to be wet-nursed by strangers, which 1970's scholarship definitively showed was directly correlated with pathological personality development.Within the realm of prostitution and surrogacy, the far right and the far left meet i.e. commodification and perverse freedom to harm yourself seem to be something they both agree upon, and Ekman captures this point-counterpoint perversity very well with the following description:“the postmodern Left and the neoliberal Right have entered into a tacit pact. The right gains power, and in exchange, the postmodern Left saves face because the power is masked in their words. While the neoliberal Right attacks the welfare state and increases the gaps between socioeconomic classes, the postmodern Left costumes the attacks in the language of rebellion. They twist and turn the concepts and search for shreds of resistance in everything, they seek strength where others have seen vulnerability: in the abused woman’s defiant glare before the blow, in the hysterical laughter of the victim of genital mutilation, in the curses of the prostituted woman – everywhere, we are now meant to see active agents.” Pg. 83I am very happy to see that books like Ekmans exist, because the general society I see opening before me, is one where the far left and the far right seem to subscribe to the same hedonistic nihilism, where their only value seems to be the value of imminent and immediate pleasure - where Nietzsche's 'ubermensch' is god, where magic and deception is the modus operandi (in relation to those outside this secret society) where science is virtually ignored, and if ever addressed, utterly relativized with confused (and deliberately confusing) sophistic attempts to represent all acts of inquiry as being a mere function of perspective - in short, before me lies a world of people who seem genuinely interested in creating the conditions for the end-of-the-world - and so thank God there exist people with the mental equilibrium to tear apart the trauma-loving, death cult that controls both the elite and the mainstream 'opposition', the neoliberal banking system, its corporations, its military industrialist branch, its media branch, and the various insane philosophies (postmodern and scientism) which converge upon a perspective that de-subjectivizes human beings by dissociating them from their bodies, which distances them from one another, and which distances them from a coherent understanding of what sort of suffering we're inviting upon ourselves and our descendants if we don't start taking reality more seriously.

Kajsa's undeniable logic, mixed with her empathy and a passion for sexual liberation (on women's terms) make this a really strong book. I loved reading it and would highly recommend to those who think that prostitution is "just like any other job".The second half is also fascinating and covers a topic - surrogacy - that doesn't get much coverage among mainstream feminists, except when middle-class (rich by global standards) white women are taking about their "choice" to buy a baby. The "choice" (or freedom) of poor women in the "Third World" to not be used as baby-making-machines is somehow left out of the discussion, but Kajsa calmly and clearly shows how surrogacy is a form of baby-trafficking that has no place within feminism.

Keen writing and powerful analysis.

All good as announced