The tension between the right to individual choice and agency and the structural and socio-economic forces which circumscribe and constrain a person’s capacity to exercise those rights lies at the centre of the feminist debates on entry routes into prostitution. From the early 1980s, despite a broad consensus among feminists on the issues of rape, sexual assault and domestic violence, what emerges is “a major schism” in the women’s movement over the “commercial representation and action of sex” (Alexander 1997: 81), a schism which continues to the present day. A “woman’s right to choose” was a fundamental demand of the women’s movement in relation to sexual freedom and reproductive control, but for radical feminists, extending this demand to the right to “choose” to sell one’s own body for the sexual service of men is regarded as theoretically and ethically flawed. The right to abortion, reproductive rights, or the right to choose to love someone of the same sex were considered inappropriate comparisons to the right “to choose to be used as the raw material in a massive capitalist sex industry” (Jeffreys 1998: 1300). According to Kappeler (1990), conceptualizing individual freedom and choice as primary and incontestable, dislocates that freedom from sexual relations and sexual politics. She argues that the sexual liberal concept of choice is in fact the choice of those who are subjects, i.e. sexual consumers, who have the economic and social power to choose an object for their own sexual gratification. The choice afforded to buyers infers “the licence to regard the other as sexual object” and as simply “a vehicle for the individual’s sexual pleasure” (178). Barry (1995) rejects personal choice politics as a function of the liberal ideology of modern capitalism which “emphasizes individualism to serve market competition and promote consumerism” (83). She warns that the “the hyper-individualism and elevation of personal choice as the only and therefore ultimate condition of freedom, if it prevails over the feminist movement, will be its final destruction” (179).

The sex of pornography and prostitution was regarded as the antithesis of mutuality and reciprocity of desire as within it “desire appears as lust for dominance and submission” (MacKinnon 1987: 149).