Is Capitalism a Threat to Sexual Health?

Whereas the United States and Canada celebrate the past, present, and future of the labor movement on Labor Day (observed the first Monday of September every year), many other parts of the world designate and celebrate May 1st as International Workers’ Day—also known as May Day. The scope of the labor movement is varied and vast, uniting workers from professions ranging from food service to healthcare, from construction work to sex work, all joining together toward the common goal of improving work conditions, advocating for fair wages, and—perhaps most fundamentally—resisting the ever-rising tide of capitalist exploitation.

At the Sexual Health Alliance, our specialty is progressive and radical education on sex and sexuality that helps us all build a more sex-positive future—a future, that is, in which the personal sexual self-determination of informed, risk-aware, consenting adults is respected, protected, and nourished. With that goal in mind, we might take the occasion of International Workers’ Day as a time to pause, reflect, and ask a very particular question: could capitalism itself pose a threat to sexual health?

Any attempt to tackle that question must start with a look at what we might mean when we talk about sexual health. It’s an unfortunate fact that many approaches to sexual health focus on not much more than the risk of unwanted pregnancy and the transmission of STIs, casting such discussions almost entirely in terms of avoiding personally aversive or socially stigmatized outcomes. Thankfully, the Harvey Institute’s Six Principles of Sexual Health (adapted by psychotherapist and author Doug Braun-Harvey from earlier frameworks advanced by the World Health Organization) go further than this, expanding discussions of sexual health to include, not just what we must avoid, but also what we might deliberately seek out. This reframing allows us to conceive of a practice of sexual health not merely as one of minimizing the negative, but also one of actively building and embracing the positive.

What are these Six Principles? First, a healthy sexual practice is one that centers and honors consent. Relatedly, healthy sexual practices are non-exploitative and honest, since exploitation and dishonesty both compromise our ability to offer genuine consent. The fourth principle—that of shared values—tells us that a healthy sexual practice involves clear understanding and alignment on the value and meaning by each person engaged in the activities in question.

Perhaps the most conventional of the principles is the fifth: protection from STIs, HIV, and unwanted pregnancy. Another way of framing and understanding this principle is as one of risk-awareness along with adequate access to means and measures (condoms and other birth control, PrEP, etc.) that aid in mitigating said risk.

Finally, the most oddly surprising of the Six Principles might be the sixth: a healthy sexual practice is one that foregrounds pleasure and erodes stigma toward the seeking and embracing of pleasure in a manner guided by the first five principles. Concern for pleasure isn’t objectionably hedonistic, but is instead an essential part of a culture of healthy sexuality.

With this notion of sexual health in mind, we can return to our original question: could capitalism itself pose a threat to sexual health? Put differently: could capitalism itself compromise our ability to reliably root our sexual practices in principles of consent, non-exploitation, honesty, shared values, protection/risk-awareness, and pleasure?

Any answer, of course, is going to depend on what we mean by capitalism. Here’s an initial characterization: capitalism is a social, political, and economic system in which the means of production (that is, the processes and resources necessary for creating and distributing goods) are privately owned by business owners for the sake of generating profit—with profit being funds generated beyond that which is minimally required for business expenses, including worker compensation.

Moving from on-paper definitions to in-practice implications, it can be argued that the effects of capitalism on both a cultural and an individual level are as vast as they are corrosive. Capitalist thinking promotes competition over collaboration (or collaboration solely as a tool for competition), as well as increasingly narrow focus on accumulation of personal wealth and the conflation of such accumulation with success. In this way, as we internalize capitalist thought and practice, we can very easily begin to see other persons as means to our own gain, less as persons in their own right and more as mere occupants of roles in a grand, profit-driven game.

For those who accumulate wealth and, along with it, private ownership of the means of production, the status quo becomes necessary to defend as long as it is conducive to further profit. Since profit is the primary prescribed motivator among the owning class, a profitable status quo must be maintained even if it is one that leads to poverty, alienation, social inequities and injustices, and ongoing climate disaster—to name just a few, very real costs.

Those who produce wealth, on the other hand—that is, the working class—play dual roles as both producers and consumers. To continuously and indefinitely perpetuate consumption, workers must be manipulated into a constant sense of inadequacy that feeds the desire to continue consuming. That sense of inadequacy is itself rooted in alienation from both self and community as well as a myth of scarcity of valued objects and experiences, reinforced through propaganda known as advertising.

From what’s been said so far, it might seem that capitalism itself is a threat to sexual health simply due to the general fact that capitalism itself is a threat to, well, pretty much everything. Is there a sense, though, in which capitalism is a threat to sexual health, specifically?

When we look at the current social, political, and economic status quo (and carefully peel back the various layers of rainbow capitalism), we see a largely sex-negative culture steeped in cisheteronormativity and compulsory monogamy. In less fancy words: we see a culture that enforces and reinforces the ideology that there should be only cisgender men who love cisgender women and cisgender women who love cisgender men, all within the context of state-sanctioned, long-term relationships centered around exclusivity with respect to both sex and romance, ideally for the purposes of reproduction and child-rearing. Along with that, anything outside of an extremely narrow range of sexual activity is considered perverse or improper—and if the exchange of money is involved, even criminal or morally wrong.

Arguably, this status quo predictably and reliably leads to an alienation of persons from themselves as sexual (or sensual) beings, and hence from themselves as embodied beings capable and worthy of giving and receiving pleasure. Another consequence, stemming largely from compulsory monogamy, is the perpetuation of mindsets of competition and scarcity with respect to love, sex, and relationships. Together, these effects result in us being alienated from our own pleasure in such a way that leaves many persons endlessly seeking fulfillment within a framework that makes genuine satisfaction hopelessly elusive, potentially even falling to the temptation of treating other persons as mere means to a supposedly scarce fix of fleeting sexual gratification.

Among those most affected by this status quo are sex workers, who move within a profession with perhaps the highest concentrated queer and femme presence and some of the most reliable means for persons of marginalized communities to directly siphon wealth from the owning class. Despite sex worker and other labor rights activists repeatedly calling for decriminalization—a move endorsed by the ACLU, the WHO, the Human Rights Campaign, Amnesty International, and more—sex work remains widely criminalized due to the simple fact that continued criminalization serves the capitalist status quo, which in turn serves the owning class.

In the ongoing and increasing push for both privatization of industry and rigid social regulation within the capitalist West, political attacks on gender-affirming and reproductive healthcare have skyrocketed while reliable access to even basic sex education and preventative aids (condoms and other birth control, PrEP, etc.) has been, in some locations, diminished to the point of nonexistence. In addition to capitalistic ideology frustrating our ability to truly experience the richness of unmitigated pleasure, then, such thinking also complicates our collective ability to move forward in a manner that prioritizes risk-awareness along with adequate access to means and measures that aid in mitigating said risk.

When we consider uncomfortably common and causal phrases such as “earning a living” and references to “the cost of living,” we can start to realize that much of our apparent consent in capitalist contexts is coerced through the simple need to stay alive. We consent to work that leaves us unfulfilled, to living conditions we despise, to food and environmental factors that slowly poison us—all so that we can hopefully accumulate and maintain enough personal resources for ourselves and those who depend on us to live somewhere, eat something, and maybe even have access to at least minimally competent healthcare. Along the way, we tragically internalize this coerced, exploitative bastardization of consent as normal. We habituate ourselves to the hard fact—which isn’t really a fact at all—that honesty and shared values are valuable only insofar as they are a tool for personal gain, to be compromised when doing so increases our own ability to profit.

This isn’t all to say, of course, that sexual health is impossible under capitalism. Instead, individual and collective sexual health, when practiced, is practiced despite capitalism rather than in a manner encouraged or facilitated by it. As long as capitalism remains a dominant social, political, and economic ideology, any practice of sexual health rooted in the aforementioned Six Principles will be an uphill battle against a deeply entrenched and very well-guarded status quo.

So, what do we do? Must we go so far as to feel compelled to restrict our sexual partners to only persons who keep a hammer and sickle in their toy bag? That’s an option, to be sure, but it likely isn’t necessary. Instead, we might start with something more reasonable: we name the problem. We acknowledge the tension. We reflect—personally and, when we can, collectively—on the ways in which internalized capitalism has sculpted and continues to shape our own biases regarding sex, gender, pleasure, relationships, consent, sex work, and more. And, perhaps most fun of all: we recognize that, whereas capitalism is a threat to sexual health, a robust commitment to sexual health is a threat to capitalism.

In that spirit, comrade, on this International Workers’ Day: I wish you all the very best of health.

Ley David Elliette Cray, PhD, CSC, ABS (she/they) is LGBTQIA+ Curriculum Coordinator for the Sexual Health Alliance and founder of Transentience Coaching.