While I was still pondering on the stigma seemingly attached to women and cooking, and/or women who dare to cook, my thought focused on the bizarre rhetoric that I had noticed for over half a decade or more, maybe, about women and ‘self-esteem.’ It becomes disturbing when the concept of ‘self-esteem’ becomes a tool to degrade women when it seems to have no scientific ground to prove. Yet people love it so much that it’s practically on the rage.

For example, the word ‘low self-esteem’ is very often employed to reason why some women find themselves in predicaments and tribulations. It gets out of control when one’s ‘self-esteem’ is addressed to explain the reason of women’s working in the sex industries and insinuated that therefore, they deserve your disrespect. Sample sentences;

women who work in sex related businesses are there because they have no self-esteem.

It used to be more common to hear

women who work in sex businesses are those who like it out of control pathologically.

I don’t know which is worse. These two ideas are still hand in hand but these two are both ignoring a fact that workers there would not do the same thing to you if they are not getting paid. It becomes alarming when these ideas progress to

Sex workers are there because they are inherently inferior to non-sex working women. 

For those who have the alarming theory nowadays often attribute their contempt for the sexworkers to their low self-esteems. Why their self-esteem is so low is because they are molested as a child. 

I see no scientific connection or explanation in this logic of ‘low self-esteem’ and it sounds more like a term to trash people unconditionally and still make it sound like you have a little consideration of psychology and those women’s interior and even welfare. I have observed this to be a mild manner to estimate and assume the other’s ‘social’ status, rather than her interior life, by the intangible and non-scientific measure and simply put them down.

The horror is now the term is so prevalent and handy that people use it to reason things that belong to social constructs and blame their incapacity of choice. As long as you regard social phenomena in this measure of judgment of individual interiors, there occurs inevitable incoherence. Take the public discourse dictated against sex workers. It is portrayed as if people’s minds are programmed by one’s trauma, they can’t control but they are dancing on the pole or turning tricks even without getting paid. To me, these are all justification of people who are benefiting ‘the inferior people’ and their guilt over it. Or projection of some inferior complex of their own as consumers before the desirability of the commodified women.

I find it noteworthy that those who actually say those things believe they have some insights and understanding about the women less privileged than themselves; this discourse is on the rage. The firm belief they seemed to have as well as fantasy they cling to while I cringe about is that sexwork is the outcome of mental dysfunction rather than another type of labor people can engage in.

Now that this surmounts the level of putting the sex workers down by almost a ‘caring rhetoric’, I think this is something we should study as the acid attack–the notorious tradition in regions from South Asia to Middle East for men to revenge women who reject their courtship: men throw acid to those who turned their marriage proposal down, which is still practiced and often the perpetrators get away with the violence in the belief that the act would discipline women in society and put things in order–in the first world premise.

As I have been observing men who are willingly to participate in the community of discussing sex work when they have practically nothing to do with the business, there is always this sort of mechanism of putting women down in a sneaky way and justify their disrespect. When it comes to women who would make them have to pay, they’re probably no better than any cave men in anywhere in the world in anytime in the history.