The perfect white homo economicus has filtered all discussions of labor with the imaginary statis of prescribed gendered and racialized notions of what and where value is.

The Western cultural imaginary of the market and the intimacy as bounded and hostile spheres gained strength in Western countries in the nineteenth century in the context of the dramatic social transformations brought about by rising industrial capitalism(Zelizer2005, p. 24). Against the cold, impersonal instrumentality of the market where The Western cultural imaginary of the market and the intimacy as bounded and hostile spheres gained strength in Western countries in the nineteenth century in the context of the dramatic social transformations brought about by rising industrial capitalism(Zelizer2005, p. 24). Against the cold, impersonal instrumentality of the market where men sold their labour, the home was imagined as a space of respite and nurture (Wilson2012, p. 41)–a shelter from commodification (O’Connell Davidson2014, p. 518),wherein relationships were based on reciprocity rather than self-interest. Intimacy, hence, signified both a space and the affects producing and involving its subjects through acts, emotions, attachments and orientations. As Marxist feminist economists have amply shown (see for example Folbre1994, Elson1998), however, the imaginary ‘of the home as a site of leisure and recreation–a “haven in a heartless world”’(Ehrenreich2004, p. 86) was a peculiarly male fantasy reliant upon the invisibilisation of the everyday work that women invested in the production of homey-ness. The scaffolding of intimacy, hence, rested on the suppression of the economic value of the activities that produced it, enabled by the affective makeover re-signifying women’s work into a gift–an expression of their ‘natural’ caring disposition. Class-based and racialised hierarchies of power arising at the intersection between the ideology of respectability and Western colonialism further contributed to making domestic and care work respectable occupations for working class women, prostitutes (see for exam-ple Agustín2007, Skeggs1997), and native women subjected by European colonial powers (see for example McClintock1995).Within this Western cultural imaginary the home was also discursively constructed as the shell of respectable sexuality, which was heterosexual, reproductive in purpose,and gratuitous. Prostitution was intrinsically at odds with this imaginary, as the sale of sex transgressed symbolically and materially its placement within the sphere of intimacy. The ensuing social disapproval for this activity, however, was unequally distributed among the parts involved in this exchange. Sexual double standards constructing men’s sexuality as ‘naturally’ voracious by and large tolerated their recourse to women prostitutes (Lyons and Lyons2011, p. 70)–whereas men’s purchasing sex from other men was invisibilised given that homosexuality was considered ‘unnatural’. For women, on the other hand, their use of sexuality signalled their positioning along a racialized temporality ranging from primitive promiscuity to the apex of modernity signified by Victorian women’s domesticated sexual desire (ibid.). Female prostitutes’ ‘promiscuous’ sexuality supposedly signaled their stunted development (Lombroso and Ferrero1903)and evolutionary proximity closer to the women inhabiting the lands colonized by Europe than to the respectable middle class women living in the European metropolis(Gilman1985, McClintock1995). Prostitution laws crystallized normative (albeit changing) definitions of where sex ought to be enacted, contextually producing women selling it to men as either objects or subjects, victims or renegades, workers or outlaws. Whether prohibited or regulated, however, the exchange of sex for money remained affectively enwrapped in social disapproval, and the blame, shame and stigma disproportionately attached to women prostitutes. The workings of this gendered and racialised economy of affect are still clearly discernible in contemporary Western European countries. The persistently low exchange value of care work (see for example: Hayes2017,O’Connor2018) arguably bears the traces of the affective makeover turning nurture and compassion into ‘natural’ i.e. effortless female dispositions. Concomitantly, despite the neoliberal urge to com-modify everything, including one’s ‘erotic capital’(Hakim2, the stigma on sex workers (see for example Plattet al.2018) remains particularly ‘sticky’(Ahmed2004, p. 120). This economy of affect, as I show in the next section, informs feminists and sex workers rights activists’ debate on the nature, roots and scale of the harm in prostitution, and their views on whether and how states should legislate over this activity. Following, I distinguish the two main positions in this debate based on what they identify as the root of the ‘prostitution problem’ i.e. gender or social inequality.