Upon opening the room share section users are immediately confronted with titles such as: “Free accommodation for gorgeous female” or “Live rent-free in luxury – avail 4 cute female”. Such adverts make “sex for rent” schemes between a male seller and a female buyer seem not only obvious, but presumably socially accepted. In this instance, the assumption that it is acceptable to request “sex for rent” originates in patriarchy, a societal structure in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded. More specifically, it originates in the patriarchal claim of a man’s rights over female bodies in both the domestic and the public space.
As Carole Pateman describes it, through the marriage contract, the woman at home is expected to perform both sex and domestic work for economic support and protection. The public aspect of patriarchal right, through what Pateman names a “prostitution contract”, manifests through the demand for female bodies to be sold as commodities in the capitalist market. Sex for rent appears to be a compelling hybrid of the two contracts, which is helping to fuel a resurgence of oppressive relations in ostensibly socially liberal societies. And while these oppressive relations manifest differently based on the subject’s ethnicity, economic status, sexual orientation and physical ability, it’s worth exploring how the basic patriarchal dynamic plays out in some of the world’s most overheated housing markets. [...]
In all these adverts, a familiar yet increasingly contested pattern of discrimination is unrestrained and painfully evident. The majority of property owners and renters are middle-aged, Caucasian men describing themselves as “successful”, “professional”, and “fit”, whilst the target audience for these advertisements are predominantly young, financially unstable women or members of the queer community. Without data on people responding, it is impossible to assess the level of exploitation underlying a particular advert. But given the fact that one is more likely to experience housing precarity as, for instance, a working class woman of colour, it is safe to say this dynamic has even more troubling implications for women affected by other sources of oppression. [...]
What should be surprising, however, is the normalisation of a deal in which one needs to abandon one human right — not to be held in servitude — in order to satisfy another — the right to adequate housing. If the exploitation of housing by real-estate were not so rife, and the home was universally accepted as a place of security, then perhaps “sex for rent” would cease to exist. The breakthrough for female emancipation is historically associated with the removal of housing from the market and the growth of the welfare state. Yet, as long as we apply to housing what Mark Fisher described as a ‘business ontology’ in which it is “simply obvious that everything in society should be ran as a business”, the underprivileged will continue to experience widespread erosion of their historic strides toward equality.
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