O the joys of being an empowered sex worker
As I understand it, the rationale behind legalizing all kinds of sex work is that the women (strippers, prostitutes, etc.) will then enjoy the rights and dignities of workers in other fields. They’ll be able to set boundaries, demand safe working conditions and reasonable job standards, earn respect for a job well done, all that stuff. Just like everybody else.
So, how’s that working out?
Twisty covers the story of how a Seattle referendum to establish a four-foot space restriction between strippers and patrons was defeated by the mafiosos and pimps who run the strip clubs, thus ensuring that Seattle men will continue to enjoy their god-given right to grope strippers and receive lap dances.
No doubt there were all kinds of issues and considerations at work in the Seattle case, but that’s beside the point for our study of the Empowered Sex Worker motif. What is revealing is the response that ensued on an anti-referendum, pro-lap dance Seattle blog when a stripper explained why the four-foot rule was a good idea:
Stripper:
“Strippers really hate the rise in lap dances and private room experiences that johns like you are increasingly demanding from us to have your ‘fun’. If imposing a four-foot rule keeps me from having one more asshole lick me, bite me, jam his fingers into me, rip my costume or otherwise act like an entitled fuckface, then four-foot rule it is. Asking you little boys nicely to stop hasn’t been working, and the last time I complained the manager laughed in my face and said, ‘You don’t have to work here, lots of girls will be happy to take a finger up the ass for what you’re getting paid.’”
Typical responses from male commenters:
“You make 100 to 300 bucks an hour? I think you should shut the fuck up and ride the dick like a good girl, or quit the business and go legit making far less. Either way, shut the fuck up.”
“That’s what you gotta deal with if you want the big bucks. So shut your mouth, shake your assets and grind on some old smelly cocks cuz if you want stripper money, that’s the deal.”
“What a wench. If you don’t want to be a stripper, then don’t. You feel you should get paid 100′s of dollars an hour just to be looked at? Are you that special? You sound like you think you’re entitled to the good life just because you were born somewhat attractive. Being a stripper is “prostitute-lite” honey, get used to it or quit. I don’t go to strip clubs because I don’t like being hustled/used by retardedly-manipulative, vacuous, coke-whore lesbos that reek of baby-powder and cheap perfume. “
See how these guys think? If you’re a woman in the sex industry, you have no boundaries. You have no rights, you have no bodily integrity, you have nothing. The very notion that strippers might want to stick to the job description of stripping, much less enact regulations to keep their revolting customers in line, is greeted with sneers. A woman drops her drawers for any reason, she’s no longer human. She’s meat.
Sex-positive feminists believe that the underlying problem here is the stigmatization of women’s sexuality. Personally I think they’re missing the root cause by one step: the deep-structure problem is patriarchy, which is why women’s sexuality is stigmatized in the first place.
But hang on — before you get all sex-positives are stoopid! anti-pornstitution rocks!, check out this review of Bernadette Barton’s book on the strip-club biz:
Many of the [stripper] activists were trying to speak out against unsafe and exploitative conditions in the sex industry, and trying to improve safety standards, but were sometimes reluctant to complain too loudly for fear of giving ammunition to conservatives and those feminists who want to abolish the sex industry altogether. That’s not to criticize the anti-sex-work feminists who, I think, raise important issues—and, judging from Barton’s book, tend to have a more accurate diagnosis of the sex industry—but it does illustrate the difficulty in seeking middle ground in the current sex-work debate. (It’s worth noting that the activists were also frustrated that “sex positive” feminists too often glossed over safety concerns.)
So: anti-pornstitution radicals may have the better handle on conditions in the industry, but they’re about as popular with sex workers as Carry Nation at a saloon-keepers’ convention. Meanwhile the sex-positives are friendly but not much help, seeing as how in their native country of la-la land it’s considered empowering to have drunks shove their fingers up your ass.* Yay feminism.
Wouldn’t it be great if all the feminist battle units could lay down arms, abandon their entrenched rhetorical positions, and start talking afresh on what we know, what we can agree on, and how we might work together to help the sex workers who are out there on the front lines getting battered daily by johns and pervs and pimps?
Yeah, well, nobody ever listens to me.
*****
*Gross distortions of anti-pornstitution and sex-positive feminism for entertainment purposes only. Action figures sold separately.
212 Responses to “O the joys of being an empowered sex worker”
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Seamus says:
Wow you really are a one-note charlie Violet, a real broken record. If anything, the porn-prostitution industry in this country exploits men and favors women, and the nightclub owner is %100 correct-just like any other job, the women are choosing to be there. They could be nurses, truck drivers, waitresses, whatever, but they see the easy cash and can’t resist. Lets use a nearby city where people aren’t quite as ashamed of their sexuality as they are in Virginia for an example-Montreal. A streetwalker there can make her own hours, choose her own clients, and charge $300 for less than an hour, all while NOT PAYING TAXES. That means two 45 minute tricks a week makes them a solid member of the middle class. There are plenty of industrious women up there making $1000′s nightly, and getting away with it. If anyone needs their rights protected its the idiots who walk into these clubs in the USA to get their money stolen from them. On top of all of this, the borderline legal status of sex work in jesusland makes it easier for unscrupuluos women to charge more and scheme johns out of their money. Why do female porn actresses earn nearly five times that of their male counterparts?
November 15th, 2006 at 3:59 pm EST -
will says:
I do not see a great way around this faustian (sp) bargain of men are willing to pay more money for flesh that they can touch than something far away that they cannot grope.
This is the inherent problem with the sex business. Like other distasteful or offensive jobs, you make more doing something distastful or offensive than you can doing something easy. (If these men had access to seeing or touching female parts for free, they wouldn’t be paying for it.)
There are certainly women who decide to start stripping simply for the money. Good return for the time put in. Once you get in though, it is hard to get out.
I just do not see a great voluntary solution to this problem other than joining forces with the morality police to legislate it almost to death.
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Victoria says:
So: anti-pornstitution radicals may have the better handle on conditions in the industry, but they’re about as popular with sex workers as Carry Nation at a saloon-keepers’ convention. Meanwhile the sex-positives are friendly but not much help, seeing as how in their native country of la-la land it’s considered empowering to have drunks shove their fingers up your ass.*
Hey, you’ve gotta love ‘divide and conquer’ at work.
Yeah, well, nobody ever listens to me.
Not true, my dear, absolutely not true. I can’t tell you how much I value your cogent assertions of the seemingly obvious (yet so universally obfuscated), like this:
Wouldn’t it be great if all the feminist battle units could lay down arms, abandon their entrenched rhetorical positions, and start talking afresh on what we know, what we can agree on, and how we work together to help the sex workers who are out there on the front lines getting battered daily by johns and pervs and pimps?
It’s going to take a long time for this kind of evolution to occur, for any narrowing of the chasms between factions on this issue. The reasons for those factions’ existence run quite deep, as you know, and the abandonment of certain core principles cannot be the “cost” of any efforts to find some “common ground.” But something’s gotta give.
I come back again and again to this: The issue is survival. No oppressed/exploited human being was ever liberated by ‘rhetoric’ alone, but then again, neither has careless, unprincipled (and even re-exploitative… if I can use ‘re-exploitative’ as word) ‘action’ served such a higher purpose.
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henderson says:
Isn’t that lovely? A bunch of regular David Nivens. Charming. And the best part is. That’s how it is- it’s not exaggerating to make a point. Believe it or don’t.
the last time I danced with a stripper we danced to Ackey Breaky Heart. She asked the bar owner if just this once she could dance a regular dance. He said okay because, well- I’m cute and he thought it would amuse the male customers. it did/ Afterwards she showed me a photo of her little baby and her lesbian lover- who looked like a man. she told me not to hold the photo up too high so the male clients couldn’t see. she was afraid to get in trouble with her boss. she was a nice lady and regular heartful sort. Not so with the customers or with the scarey boss. Lost their souls and forgot where to find them.
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Violet says:
Will: the problem is that attempts to regulate the job of stripper are met with derision by the male customers who apparently regard such regulation as an affront. Basically these men are saying that a woman doing any kind of sex work is completely at their disposal for any kind of abuse they care to dish out.
Is there any other job where society is willing to accept no regulation, no limitation, no worker rights, no nothing?
If that’s an inherent problem with the sex business — that it can’t be regulated and the sex workers are going to be at risk of all levels of abuse — then how do you conclude that the only thing to do about is nothing?
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Violet says:
By the way, I’ve got a misogynist troll hanging fire in the moderation queue who wants to help us understand that the sex industry exploits johns, not prostitutes: the poor boys are getting schemed out of their money while the lazy unscrupulous prostitutes live high on the hog.
Maybe I should send him to Richard’s blog.
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henderson says:
If these men had access to seeing or touching female parts for free, they wouldn’t be paying for it.)
It’s a lovely thought but this is not true. Most are married and/or have girlfriends.
let that guy Violet. it will show something.
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henderson says:
That guy is not an anomoly Violet. Believe it or don’t
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Paul Tergeist says:
I guess I don’t understand the point of this thread. Maybe it’s because I have never been to a strip club or even a nightclub. It seems to me like the girls don’t want to be groped, and who can blame them, but work in strip clubs anyway, where the only customers are likely to be gropers.
It wouldn’t cost anything for the club owners to install barriers to keep the customers off the girls, but I’m guessing that most of the money the girls make is cash slipped into their costumes, so the way they make money is to tease and titillate guys, admittedly misogynistic dirtbags, into sticking money into their ‘costumes’ and that if they are good at it they can make $300 an hour. I can also imagine that if they were dancing inside plexiglass cages they would be making minimum wage.
Anyway, I had difficulty understanding why something like this was on the ballot in the first place and an even more difficult time believing that the girls in strip clubs don’t get paid at all….they PAY the CLUB OWNERS for the ‘opportunity’ to flash their asses and give lap dances.
I’m no prude, but I’m kinda grossed out over this whole thing, but that’s democracy. It isn’t always right but it’s better than Sharia.
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Paul Tergeist says:
Damn, my post was supposed to be the first one in the thread, bit I got hung up on the phone and now it’s irrelevant….as many of my posts are.
Let the troll in. I’ll talk to him.
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Violet says:
Okay, just this once.
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Violet says:
Oh, shit, where’d it go? I think I accidentally smushed it when I meant to approve it. Sorry.
Wait, no– there it is. Right above me.
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Infidel says:
“Is there any other job where society is willing to accept no regulation, no limitation, no worker rights, no nothing?”
Making “Jackass” movies.
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Violet says:
Oh, right: because being a millionare movie star with a stunt team is exactly like getting paid $50 to have old men piss in your mouth.
Infidel, why don’t you go hang out with Seamus.
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Paul Tergeist says:
Why do female porn actresses earn nearly five times that of their male counterparts?
-seamusBECAUSE THEY’RE WORTH IT! OK, just kidding. I must have been born in a barn because I have never even SEEN a hooker in real life (except on TV). I saw one on some documentary who worked at a legal place in Nevada. She said she did it because she loved the work and I believed her. She worked in a clean, safe, sanitary place, owned a huge home, drove a Mercedes and picked her clients. If I could get that kind of money to sleep with the girls of my choice, I would be happy to give it a go.
I am sure that ladies who sell their companionship for several thousand dollars an hour, whether to be arm candy or something else, have a choice. And I can live with that. Guys do the same thing and I know of women on the mainland who say they have outcalled guys for sex.
But I’m not sure that some poor girl who has three kids and works in a raunchy nightclub to keep food on the table has the same choices. It’s a dirty profession anyway, in dirty joints with dirty customers. People do what they have to do to survive but it’s pretty clear that MOST of the women who are forced into work like that DO NOT want to be there. And what the HELL do you mean “easier for unscrupulous women charge more and scheme johns out of their money”? Man, you make it sound like the women who are being handled like meat are guilty of overcharging for being assaulted. Don’t you have any concept of the fact that women are people too? How much does your mom overcharge “Johns”?
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Anonymous was a Woman says:
Seamus, I suggest that you shut the fuck up, unless you
a) find some fucking humanity, or
b) sell your own ass.The vast majority of women’s earnings in the sex industry (at all levels) go right back to the pimps, tricks, “managers” and other lowlifes who create and sustain the public demand for the sex industry. Trust me, you asswipe: their “take” is a lot greater than your fucking taxes. Whatever’s left after that, more often than not, tends to go toward the high costs of anesthesia (e.g., drug habits) which (only somewhat) helps blunt the effect of all that violence and degradation. (Not to mention: the infuriating misogyny of smegma-brained fuckwads like you.)
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Burrow says:
See, as an IWW delegate and a radical feminist I’ve come up against this a lot, and I definitely take your point of view more with the situation. Everyone asks me if I’m against unionising then, and I tell them that I think unionising the workplaces is a good step, but only a step. I want the workers to be able to have control of their situation, but what I really want is to rid the planet of patirarchy and therefore sex work. I think that that’s exactly what you’re talking about. (And I feel a blog brewing on this topic. Look for it tonight.)
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Paul Tergeist says:
but what I really want is to rid the planet of patirarchy and therefore sex work..
-BurrowNo, you REALLY want to rid the planet of the way nature evolved animals. You seem to think that humans, because we have taken over the world…..and ruined it….are somehow higher lifeforms than everything else. But we aren’t. And then you carry that one step further and say that the MALE animals, which also evolved this way, are the problem and that without them everything would be fine.
My feeling is that we are all in this together and that we must solve either it together or go extinct. If women want to stop the patriarchy, just stop having babies. What’s the worse that can happen…your husband will kill you? So what? The joke will be on men and the earth might survive humanity.
Lemme tell you that the overwhelming majority of churchgoing Christians are women. Ask Violet. Because they ~choose~ to believe in some invisible pal in the sky. Not because the patriarchy makes them. And Christianity IS the patriarchy.
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Violet says:
Paul, thank you for the advice on not having babies, but we’re trying to have a serious conversation here. The correct approach to sex work and how to help sex workers is a serious division in feminism and I’d like to have a substantive conversation about that.
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Infidel says:
“Oh, right: because being a millionare movie star with a stunt team is exactly like getting paid $50 to have old men piss in your mouth.”
The last jackass clips I ran into were a guy making a piss snocone and eating it, strapping a bottle rocket to his dick and lighting it, and other such stunts that earn the jackass title.
for just one shining moment I thought I wasn’t a troll.
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Ryan says:
That’s great, Paul. “It’s the oppressed’s job to stop themselves from being oppressed.” God, why didn’t I think of that?!
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henderson says:
I get your jackass analogy Infidel.
and i also apprecite your honest description about your primordial reaction to viewing porn. Understand that too.
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henderson says:
The jackass movies are ones where men and boys do outrageous and degrading things for a little bit of money and noteriety. a good deal of the time they hurt themselves. The primary audience who watch these movies are the same ones who buy Girls Gone Wild and Saw II.
The most dangerous thing in thing in the world is a male between the age of 17-35.
Paul do you speak up for your little girl? Is that why you are a feminist?
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henderson says:
I meant to say that “the most dangerous thing in the entire world is a male between the age of 17-35″. They make most of the trouble.
I didn’t say that. A male Italian official did. I asked why did Italy have conscripted military? and his answer was the above quote. He said that there were all sorts of anweres for it. But he said the real, actual privately held reason was to keep males of a certain “dangerous’ age off the streets and give them something to do and somewhere to go instead of hanging around making troubles in society. He wanted the consription to last alot longer.
I’m not making any poliitcal statement. Just making conversation.
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Violet says:
Jackass isn’t a job. It’s a series of stunts by a few high-risk morons. The world has always had a few high-risk morons who’ll do anything for fame or attention or a monetary payoff.
Sex work isn’t a high-risk stunt by a few. It’s a job, an industry, a multi-billion dollar industry wherein millions of women around the globe slave away day after day to make ends meet.
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henderson says:
I could be wrong but the Girls Gone Wild thing may be a little the same. They are usually very young, very drunk and doing god knows what for money encouraged by very clever people. Is that what he was saying? I don’t know. I hear your take on it.
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richard cherry says:
Maybe I should send him to Richard’s blog.
cool, Vi – traffic is traffic and my grand plan of starting a porn farm (presumably all the animals are naked) has to be realised somehow. also don’t get many men visiting. do you think i’m the only male blogger running what’s effectively a women only space???
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henderson says:
Isn’t there a sort of people in this world that like to encourage other people to make fools of themselves, even hurt themselves for their and others like them pleasure? And is’tn there such a kind of person in this world so lonely, so confused who will do anything to be liked? One preys apon the other. yes this is such a thing.
Please pardon the rudeness that’s coming next.
they laugh amongst themselves as they say “lets see if we can get her to suck a donkey.”
and they tell her anything she wants to hear to get her to do it ( all the while laughing at her). and they say “No, there’s nothing wrong with it. You’re a champ. You’re the best. Go on now. “
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henderson says:
In that world there are schlemiels and schlamozzles. And people who like to watch it. And I make no difference in my mind between those who like to watch it and those who like to produce it. But I’m always going to look out for the schlamozzles.
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will says:
I wasnt suggesting that you do nothing. I was just expressing the frustration of joining forces with the moral majority.
I am not a fan of strip clubs, prostitutes or porn. I wouldnt be upset if it went away.
However, I also think it is a very fine line between legislating safety and legislating morality.
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SB says:
Could this be a particularly US thing? In the Strip Clubs in NZ there is a very clear rule “don’t touch where they girl say you can’t touch – or else”.
When you book a dance the manager reminds you of this rule as you pay. There is at least 1 alarm button in each dance room which the stripper will push if you break the rules.
I have seen security throwing one guy out who broke the rules. The girls have a very “you might have paid me but I AM IN CHARGE” attitude. The NZ girls would just not put up with the sort of Sh1t that was being talked about above and I don’t think the bosses would either.
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Violet says:
Henderson, the Girls Gone Wild thing may be somewhat analogous to Jackass (with of course the huge difference that GGW plays into women-as-the-sex-class while Jackass doesn’t). But the main thing is we’re talking about sex work as a job, which I don’t think GGW is.
Here’s the issue: why do the patrons of strip clubs (as exemplified on the Seattle blog excerpted above) reject the notion that strippers should set boundaries around their work? That suggests to me that the standard prescription to “legalize everything and thus eliminate the stigma” is missing a key component. These strippers in Seattle are perfectly legal and they’re working in legal strip clubs. The referendum was about enacting restrictions that would keep the stripping job to stripping and not prostitution. Male customers clearly regard that as an outrage, and you can see from the way they address the stripper that they despise these women and consider them trash fit for whatever abuse they want to dish out.
I’ll give the game away here and reveal my biases: I think the anti-prostitution feminists have pretty much got it exactly right about how nasty it is out there now, about what happens to women doing sex work even when it’s legalized. That’s the extant situation and we need to deal with that now and not just talk about how eventually, decades from now, all this endorsing of sex work will eventually lead to men not thinking of women as garbage. I’m sympathetic to the sex-positive utopia, I really am, I just think our current situation is light-years away from that. On the other hand, the usual anti-prostitution solutions (criminalizing the buying of sex, for example) tend to be extremely hard to effect in the present situation and aren’t even welcomed by a lot of the sex workers themselves who just want to keep their jobs without risking nightly abuse and harrassment and rape.
I want us to do fresh thinking about this problem, putting aside our usual conclusions and prescriptions. What needs to happen to make these women powerful and safe and in control? How can we, the intellectual educated computer-literate blogging feminists, help the women out there who are suffering ENORMOUSLY while we argue over which theoretical path to eliminating the Evil Empire (Patriarchy) is the correct one?
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henderson says:
That four foot rule was a nice start. It was just a little thing. Didn’t sound too much to ask. Of course, it would only start up other places that have no four foot rule. And those would be the places the regulars would go to. Same for houses of prostitution. The regulars would move on. I don’t want him to pee pee on me. Okay i’ll go somewhere where i can. I don’t want him to put it in my hiney. Okay I’ll go somewhere where I can. And she won’t be legal, And she won’t be unionized and she’ll shut up. Don’t believe me, that’s okay- maybe in some utopia they’ll all work out. and I’m not buying the NZ story either.. sorry, not being helpful. That’s because of the very nature of thing.
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henderson says:
And what the heck, the Jackass business rEInforces and encourages and celebrates males as the idiot, childish class. And many a hat on backwards, grunge 30 or even 40 something males thinks he must aspire to it to be a “male”. And the producers of such. same as the producers of this female as the sex class business and the watchers ( supporters) laugh all the way to the bank. Schlamiels and schlamozzles. I am worried sometimes that the anti porns are schlamozzles sometimes in these blogs about such subjects.
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Dlunch says:
I am stating the obvious here but I will rant nonetheless. I think the responses of those men,to the comment of the stripper, show that most of those men, that go to strip clubs, go to reinforce their own sense of entitlement. It is not about sex, or looking at an attractive person. It is simply about reminding themselves that they are in charge. The comments seem to be men, like the troll, who walk around seething in their own venomous hatred of any imagined power or advantage that women might have do to their sex. Attractive women are imagined to have extra power and hated for it, the idea that these women can make money from doing what these men feel they should do for them for free…well in the very least they deserve to get a finger up their ass. Most of these guys think that all women deserve, this treatment, but they keep it to themselves, and they probably feel that this is an achievement in self-control on their part. However, I think the anger of these men is evidence to defeat the proposition that prostitution keeps men from being violent, on the contrary it adds to their anger at having to pay for what they think they are entitled to. It is a constant reminder of why they hate women.
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Dlunch says:
Okay before anyone corrects my grammar that should have been due to their sex. Maybe you are all sleeping?
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Victoria says:
Oh shush with the grammar self-correction, what you said was brilliant.
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Paul Tergeist says:
I spent several hours agonizing how to respond to this and finally deleted it all. As it turns out, Violet stated my position rather succinctly in #32, but she fails to distinguish between ALL men and the dirtbags who frequent strip clubs.
I especially liked Dlunch’s comment in #35, and all the more so because she specified “that most of those men, that go to strip clubs”, showing that she recognizes that not every male on the planet is an overt or covert member of the Patrilluminati concerned only with oppressing women.
In fact, the ONLY thing I have against Feminazis is that they are mostly dykes who hate ALL men and blame men for every injustice, real or imagined.
I do not dispute that many of them are justified or have been mistreated. The President of the US says everything goes and no one has any rights.
I simply want ALL women to recognize that NOT ALL male heterosexuals consider themselves to be ‘entitled’ and that one must emasculate themselves in order to be seen as a progressive and a proponent of equal rights and individual choice.
While I do believe that many people of both sexes are used and abused, I also believe that half of being a victim is developing the mentality of a victim and just…giving up.
Ultimately no one is going to ride up on a white horse and deliver anyone from evil. They have to make the decision themselves, develop a plan and act on it.
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Tom Nolan says:
SB
I know that NZ is a non-tipping country so far as ordinary commercial transactions are concerned. Does that obtain in strip-clubs etc too? Because that would explain the intolerance of physical proximity – the women involved would have nothing to gain from it. In the US (I think it was Paul who brought this up) the women seem to make a lot of money from cash stuffed into their garters etc by patrons who naturally have to get up close to do so – and that’s when the latter “cop a feel” or stick a finger somewhere inappropriate etc.
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Janeen says:
A woman drops her drawers for any reason, she’s no longer human. She’s meat.
I don’t think she even has to drop her drawers first. She’s always meat. (We’re always meat.)
And I am thinking very seriously about your question of what we should do. I’m not sure I have any good ideas, but I wanted you to know that I am here, in Seattle, thinking about it.
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will says:
“And I am thinking very seriously about your question of what we should do. I’m not sure I have any good ideas, but I wanted you to know that I am here, in Seattle, thinking about it.”
brainstorming conference in Seattle. nturns40 provides the coffee and photography.
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Infidel says:
“I don’t think she even has to drop her drawers first. She’s always meat. (We’re always meat.)”
In the first place she’s got these eyes, some kind of cell structure sets itself up a distance from some other kind of surface cells that are somehow photochemically activated and here is the kicker, they(the first set of cells) are more or less shaped, albeit flexible for some adjustment, to optimize the passage of light through and to the second set of cells. She’s got these muscles(ok meat) attached to the first set of cells that stretch the first set of cells. Then there is this third set of cells that are set up in a concentric circle basically on the surface of the light side of the first set of cells that adjust the opening to let in more or less light depending on ambient conditions and recent intake of drugs so that the second set of cells recieve an amount of light that is as close to homeostasis as possible with eyes open. All housed in sockets composed of a material that forms itself with an eye towards how best to optimally support stresses exerted when anchored muscles(meat) flex. All covered over with sheets and groups of individually controlled meat that in time will be manipulated in such a way as to convey meaning, intentionally or not, misunderstood by others or understood. The meaning conveyed not by the meat itself but the affect the meat has on an overlaying thickness of stratified tissue each strata with its own purpose the final outside one, one that fluffs off and floats away with every blink an squint.
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cicely says:
Sex-positive feminists believe that the underlying problem here is the stigmatization of women’s sexuality. Personally I think they’re missing the root cause by one step: the deep-structure problem is patriarchy, which is why women’s sexuality is stigmatized in the first place.
Violet, I for one agree with you that patriarchy is the root cause of the stigmatisation of women’s sexuality, but still, patriarchy isn’t a monolith that can be brought down on a given day, all of a piece. We all know how bloody painfully slow unraveling it is. (ooh, I just had de ja veux – have I written this before?) I get quite frustrated with the cry ‘smash the patriarchy’ because it ain’t gonna happen that way. So, one of the places I start from is : ‘Women’s sexuality has been stigmatised, let’s fix that.’ Another place is:’Women have historically, over many centuries, been denied education, political and economic power and been forced to depend for their survival on men who asked about themselves ‘what should/can we *do*?’ and about women ‘what are they *for*?’ – with the answers turning and churning out via ‘educated’ references to each other (certainly not to women themselves) to be pretty much what suited the self-appointed lords and askers in the first place. Sexual slaves, domestic slaves, field slaves, bearers and carers of their sons and heirs and so on and bloody on. Oh, and the keepers of all virtue!
We’ve only drop in the ocean recently begun defining ourselves from and for ourselves, with no reliable pre-patriarchy memory to guide us. (Which is not to say there haven’t been what we’d now call feminists in all ages – women – and a few men – who spotted the injustices and spoke out about them.)
So, those guys bitching to/about the strippers? Still asking what women are for. Slow. Strippers are doing it for themselves, boys.(To pay for college, pay the bills, buy a car or a house, and maybe sometimes because they actually enjoy it… whatever – because they can.) Get used to it. I hope they eventually get the four foot rule – since they’re strippers and not prostitutes – and I’d be interested to know in detail why they didn’t.
Legalisation or decriminalisation of sex work of any kind isn’t going to de-stigmatise it, or women’s sexuality in general, overnight. But – regarding thinking fresh – something I feel we have to do as women, as feminists and as workers is not separate ourselves out from sex workers. All of us are vulnerable to sexism, misogyny and male violence that wouldn’t disappear even in the hugely unlikely circumstance that sex work did. Sex work isn’t the cause. It’s something women (mostly) have long done (often but not always having no other choice) and will no doubt continue to do in the world we all live in, under whatever legal situation they have to work around, for some time to come – and maybe forever but in a very different atmosphere. If you can’t even imagine willingly prostituting yourself – that’s ok, but leave it at that. Every woman who does is not informed by what goes on in *your* mind about it. She’s doing what she needs to do or has decided to do for her own reasons – and it’s her life and her body.
As to the figure of 92% of sex workers who want to get out of the sex industry – I don’t imagine that means they all – to a person – have absolutely *no* other income earning options, but that for whatever reason this remains the best of a range of poor options. ( not including trafficked or otherwise forced sex slaves here.) The work to be done in that case is in the creation of genuinely better employment opportunities. Getting rid of the one they’ve settled on themselves, or making or keeping the work more difficult and dangerous than it needs to be, for either moral or political purity reasons isn’t practically very helpful at all.
I’m wondering whether anyone has an example of particular ways sex-pos feminists are glossing over the health and safety aspects of the sex industry. It must have happened to have been
commented on, but how? -
Violet says:
It must have happened to have been commented on, but how?
That particular quote came from the review of Barton’s book-length study on the strip-club business; apparently the strippers themselves felt that the sex-pos crowd was rather too cavalier and a bit unrealistic about the situation. The impression I get (and I still haven’t read Barton’s whole book) is that the sex workers themselves get rather fed up with the “empowering” talk of some sex-positive fems. Sex work isn’t empowering, they say; it’s bloody hard and dehumanizing and dangerous, but they need the job. And that “needing the job” bit is why the anti-sexwork feminists are even more unpopular with these strippers/phone sex girls; calls to abolish the industry are not welcome.
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will says:
“Sex work isn’t empowering, they say; it’s bloody hard and dehumanizing and dangerous, but they need the job. And that “needing the job” bit is why the anti-sexwork feminists are even more unpopular with these strippers/phone sex girls; calls to abolish the industry are not welcome.”
When you hear about a drug dealer getting shot, what do you think?
1. Poor guy had no choice but to get into the dangerous business?
or
2. The danger is what makes it so profitable?Do strippers or prostitutes really need the job or are they trying to take a short cut for a bigger payday?
How many strippers or drug dealers are in those jobs because they have to as opposed to because they want to?
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henderson says:
an aspect of this that I don’t fully understand and has nothing to do with what you guys are talking about, but i’m free associating.
Many, many men, most- probably these days, do frequent such clubs or look at porn and have been to prostitutes and all the sex related buisnesses out there. More so now than ever before. I think alot of women get scared about this because it renders these fellows less trustworthy as a potential mate and partner and boyfreind. He becomes less atractive or unattractive to her because she does not understand his “need” for this stuff. She doesnt’ know what’s going on in his mind. “Why would he do this?” “I don’t” she thinks. “What is all this nonsense?” He becomes a little scarey. And when I say “HE” I mean all the guys who go to strip clubs, buy porn alot, go to prostitutes.” and thats ALOT of guys out there rendering themselves “unsuitable” or at the very least making the ladies nervous about having long term realtionships with them. Nobody likes to get a heartbreak, a shock or a surprise. It’s the very worst thing that can happen just about. Why is he doing this? What’s up with that? when 68 percent of guys have been to prostitutes. and heaven knows what the percentage of men who look frequently at porn or go to clubs or phone sex. There are some women out there who don’t mind. But for most- it’s just confusing and scarey. I think alot of women choosing to remain alone these days is partly ( maybe not entirely) a result of this.
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SB says:
Tom Nolan:
You might have a good point there Tom. Most of the women’s income comes via the club not via tips. It costs her relatively little to have somebody thrown out, and the club nothing at all.
The dancers are paid the minimum wage ($7 per hour) while working at the club. If they do a dance on the stage then that’s another $20. If they come near you you are expected to put a note in their outfit, and if you don’t they wont be back. but its not real money its “play money” that you have to buy at the bar and its just $1 or $2 notes. You are not really allowed to put two notes just one (though some do of course!). For a lap dance she pays a fixed per hire charge ($20) and you pay for a time up front at the bar so for 30 Min’s that’s $90. For a game of pool it’s $60 for 30 Min’s but there is no charge to her she keeps it all, you have to put money into the pool table as normal. You don’t have to tip the lap dancer, I tipped one $10 and was told I had tipped to much and was handed back $5.
So her cash cost to have you thrown out by security is no more than $5. And despite what somebody said you will be “asked to leave”.
When you go into the club you are always reminded of the touching rule, they will turn the music off 5-10 times a night to remind all the customers of the rule. When you go into a room for a lap dance she will always say ” remember the rules, the dance will be stopped if you break them and you will be asked to leave with no refund”
The dancers in the clubs that I go to would never put up with the sort of behaviour that other posters here are talking about.
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henderson says:
Once, a long time ago I went bananas. i was working a club. and when they say it’s depressing -it really is. That one lady was describing how depressing it was and wondering why the patrons didn’t notice it. i wondered the same thing too. yet they don’t. it’s obviously not depressing to them. A mystery to me. but anyway…
One night, i was at the end of my rope and lost it. and I made a big jerk of myself by saying to the partons “Don’t you people have homes and families to go to? what the hell are you doing hanging around here all the time?” Well, this of course went over like a lead baloon. but I was on my way out anyway. and strangley enough. I really wasn’t asking a retorical question to those guys. I really was hoping one of them would answer me. Because i really did want to know why the hell they were always hanging around in a dark, noisey, depressing place like that. Because if one- just one- would have answered in an honest, normal, decent, human, heartful way- I might have understood and stayed in that job- This was a “high class’ place. But nothing classy was going on in there.
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Violet says:
SB, who are you? Why do you go to strip clubs?
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SB says:
Violet:
Who am I? Well Mr Average really, 47 years old – was married for 22 years, full time employed, 3 kids grown up now, well paid.
Why strip clubs. Well several reasons really, I love women, I have many more female friends than male friends. I love their company.
New Zealand is on some sort of a travel circuit. People come here, work a year, move to Oz, work a year, move to SA, work a year, move to Europe work a year etc etc etc. As work in the adult industry tends to be temporary by its nature it fits in very well with these traveling women.
I very rarely went to strip clubs when I was married (think about 5 times in 22 years) as I did not feel it was correct for a family man. Now that I am single that rule does not apply. In my youth the clubs were shitty places, probably run by the gangs, you got ripped off etc.
Now the clubs are run buy professionals, they are clean, the rules are upheld, nobody is ripped off, just like normal business I guess. To give you an idea one of the places i go has a strict anti-drug rule. All staff(not just the dancers) are randomly drug tested. Several of the staff were dismissed the other day for failing tests.
In this club I have met some of the most beautiful, intelligent, personable women that I have ever seen. They are an absolute delight to be with. I like these women so much that I am prepared to spend money to be in their company.
Here is an important point, just because I have spent money does not make me think I have an entitlement to be there. I regard it as a privilege.
If I though that these woman were in any way being mistreated I would have nothing to do with it and I am sure many of the other men feel the same.
The women make a hell of a lot of money, I take any excuse I can to talk with them, so I hear what they really talk about not some staged talk for the customers. Two of them the other day were talking about their new cars, $60,000 each – I could not afford that and they were 21-22 years old!
Does that answer your question Violet?
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henderson says:
So the question of my life is.
why are the guys doing this? why? I know why the girls are doing it. but i cannot understand why the guys are.
not just strip clubs, but all of it.
“men hate women” isn’t a good enough answer for me. There’s got to be more to it than that. Men are stupid penis oriented neanderthals with no soul isn’t good enough for me either. their mothers were mean isn’t good enough. They are lonely isn’t good enough. Because I know for a fact that most of these guys DO actually have wives and girlfriends and families and homes to go to. What are they doing???? it only makes people MORE lonely. Not less.
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henderson says:
Pardon me we cross posted, SB have heard that one before. And I smile because one other fun things about working in the club is how some regulars like to think they are special with the ladies. I am being mean.
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Violet says:
Does that answer your question Violet?
Yes. You’re a john.
You’re not welcome here. This is a feminist blog and many of the women who read and comment here have spent their lives dealing with johns and pervs and pimps. This is a place for them to talk.
It’s not a place for johns like you to live your fantasy that all the girls love their work and you’re just a great guy who loves women and paying women to strip and bump and grind on your lap is just evidence of how much you enjoy conversation with intelligent human beings.
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SB says:
Henderson:
Yes I understand your point and I am sure that some people fall into that trap.
However I have noticed that if you are a regular the dancers attitude to you changes when they realise that you are going to treat them with respect and that you are not a shitbag.
I am not stupid enough to think they are in love with me!
I think its like most things in life, you treat others with respect and they treat you back the same way.
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henderson says:
Two of the reasons why they travel is because the regulars like to see new meat. In order for a club to be successful to regulars they must provide new girls. Johns get tired of the same prostitutes. The clubs and curcuits “trade” girls. And the other reason is because they will follow the tourist type of season. Also they don’t like for girls to get too comfortable in one place so they don’t start up a thing going on her own.
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Anonymous was a Woman says:
However I have noticed that if you are a regular the dancers attitude to you changes when they realise that you are going to treat them with respect and that you are not a shitbag.
I am not stupid enough to think they are in love with me!
No, you’re just stupid enough to think that you’re not a shitbag.
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richard cherry says:
the way SB got talked to is the harshest I’ve seen here. people have come out with all kinds of shit and been talked to like they are human and he gets an absolute ‘you’re dirt’. now IF he’s genuine (???) he is deluded (either wilfully or otherwise)and consuming the product of an industry most people here are uneasy with (on a scale of uneasy to ‘ban it now’) but he’s been saying things a lot less scary than some of the shit our fellow posters come up with and vi (who is almost always one to err on the side of tolerance – not of the intolerable, it’s true) takes a really hard line (yes it’s your blog, but i haven’t seen you play that card and generally civil debaters are welcome). What is it about attitudes to the industry and its consumers that make us react like that to him? And maybe my reaction to it is where we begin to see the line between men and women on this – maybe it’s purely because of my sex (and maybe or maybe not the privilege inherent in that, tho i think it’s simpler)that while I don’t use the products of the industry (apart from watching adverts which are, let’s face it, pretty pornographic) I can’t summon the instinctive gut hatred of the whole thing to cross the liberal line and go for prohibition. as usual, I wonder…
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Violet says:
Yes, Richard, it is my blog, and we all have our limits. The nice thing about personal blogs is that we can indulge our own idiosyncracies. Johns make my skin crawl.
I tried to be civil to Mr. John and in fact I haven’t banned him. He can read here. But I’m not interested in hearing about how happy the strippers are at his favorite clubs and how it’s all a wonderful sharing experience between mutually respectful human beings.
What is it about attitudes to the industry and its consumers that make us react like that to him? And maybe my reaction to it is where we begin to see the line between men and women on this – maybe it’s purely because of my sex (and maybe or maybe not the privilege inherent in that, tho i think it’s simpler )that while I don’t use the products of the industry (apart from watching adverts which are, let’s face it, pretty pornographic) I can’t summon the instinctive gut hatred of the whole thing to cross the liberal line and go for prohibition.
Part of it may be your gender, though obviously some women aren’t at all upset by sex work and some men are.
But one thing is if you’re a woman, you’re more likely to have either worked in the sex industry yourself or known other women who have. That makes it personal. Very personal. I have never been a sex worker myself, but I know women who have, a friend of mine in college was destroyed by stripping, and as a former circus performer my photographs were once used without my permission by a pornographer, a travesty that still infuriates me.
Which brings me to another thing about being a woman: sex work is a continuum of the objectification of women in our culture. Now that I’m a middle-aged bat I’m pretty much invisible, but throughout my young womanhood I was jeered at, leered at, verbally assaulted, groped, attempted-raped, etc. I suspect that makes it a lot easier to identify with the women who are coping with this groping/abuse for a living, shaking their assets while men howl at them and insult them and paw at them.
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witchy-woo says:
“I think the anti-prostitution feminists have pretty much got it exactly right about how nasty it is out there now, about what happens to women doing sex work even when it’s legalized. That’s the extant situation and we need to deal with that now and not just talk about how eventually, decades from now, all this endorsing of sex work will eventually lead to men not thinking of women as garbage.”
Right on, Violet. I think it’s important to remember that patriarchy create(d) whores for its own purpose and endorsement of sex work simply serves that purpose. Endorsing sex work maintains the status quo and patriarchy remains unchallenged.
“And that “needing the job” bit is why the anti-sexwork feminists are even more unpopular with these strippers/phone sex girls; calls to abolish the industry are not welcome.”
I wonder if the work of childcare was more valued and respected; if childcare facilities were more affordable and available; if child support was paid, at a realistic rate, regularly and on time; if fewer girl children were groomed through childhood sexual abuse; if women actually earned equal pay for equal work; if that message that’s all around us – “women = sex” – were to disappear and women became societally valued as people instead; I wonder just how many women would still have to “need the job”- for whatever reason.
“throughout my young womanhood I was jeered at, leered at, verbally assaulted, groped, attempted-raped, etc. I suspect that makes it a lot easier to identify with the women who are coping with this groping/abuse for a living, shaking their assets while men howl at them and insult them and paw at them.
Richard – generally speaking, a woman/girl’s experience as a human being in this world is made not a happy one by exactly this.
AWAW @ 56 – that was wonderful!
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Violet says:
Richard, the other thing I meant to say and forgot to include in my comment is this: the very reaction to Mr. John that you wondered about is a big part of why he’s not welcome here, aside from my own antipathy. Several of my readers and commenters are women who’ve done sex work. For a lot of them, being confronted with a john (especially a delusional one) in a place that’s supposed to be safe to talk about their own experiences or think about the reality of the industry — it’s just intolerable. Suddenly they’re coping with their anger and resentment towards shitbags, feeling shut down and their own experiences countered (by a john of all people!), instead of having a productive feminist discussion with other women.
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Violet says:
I can’t summon the instinctive gut hatred of the whole thing to cross the liberal line and go for prohibition.
I almost missed this bit, but I’m not arguing here for prohibition, though I would love to see this kind of thing disappear. My attitude is similar to Burrow’s: I want to keep building towards a world without patriarchy and where demeaning sex work situations don’t exist, but in the meantime what can we do to help these women who are out there?
This issue has been bearing on my mind a lot lately as I think about how far modern feminism has come from where we started (or at least where I started during the 70s). Blogging is a fantastic new avenue for feminism, for consciousness-raising, for educating ourselves, for making our voices heard. I’m hoping we’ll move into a new phase of effective activism — activism that to a large extent petered out when the balkanization of the movement set in.
What can we do right now? Are unions a good idea? Should we be pushing for sex workers to be unionized in every city?
Here’s a thought experiment: When we talk about the fantasy Star Trek future where there’s no sexism, no sex class, we talk about the possible existence of people who enter sex careers as a choice, because they’re so inclined. Both men and women. I sense that sex-positives are holding this image in their mind when they think about de-stigmatizing sex work, and that’s a fine image. We’re just very, very far from that. Light years away. What would it take to get to that? Obviously the patriarchy needs to go away, but what kinds of specific things would be different for the sex workers themselves? What I’m getting at is if we can imagine the role of sex workers in this future utopia, perhaps that will help us think about what steps we need to take now to transform the working conditions of these women.
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cicely says:
And when I say “HE” I mean all the guys who go to strip clubs, buy porn alot, go to prostitutes.” and thats ALOT of guys out there rendering themselves “unsuitable” or at the very least making the ladies nervous about having long term realtionships with them. Nobody likes to get a heartbreak, a shock or a surprise. It’s the very worst thing that can happen just about.
I keep saying, henderson, ‘quelle surprise?’ 68% of men, you say. But not *my* husband, boyfriend, father, brother, son or friend. Neither dishonesty on the part of men nor denial on the part of women are very helpful overall. Much effort goes into preserving an ideal of fidelity that largely doesn’t exist.
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cicely says:
I think it’s important to remember that patriarchy create(d) whores for its own purpose and endorsement of sex work simply serves that purpose. Endorsing sex work maintains the status quo and patriarchy remains unchallenged.
witchy-woo – Do these kinds of things: completely decriminalising sex work (because legalisation only offers limited freedom and invites abuse by the rule – enforcers), putting clear job descriptions in place so that, for example, strippers aren’t to be touched, providing income, health and safety protections etc constitute endorsement to you? Given that women will do sex work, for their own reasons, under any legislative circumstances, if (generic) you can’t support any or all of the above, I don’t think you can help them. It’s that simple. They remain out on a limb, sacrificed to a feminist vision of the future you might have but that is currently no less la la land than my probably somewhat different vision.
Or -anyone got any alternative, practical suggestions as to how to help these women on the front lines – now?
p.s. patriarchy hasn’t been unchallenged on most fronts for some time now.
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cicely says:
I just cross-posted with your comment #61, Violet.
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Sam says:
Back up a second, folks. Fuck you, terminology “sex worker”, for your intentionally water-muddying effects.
Adult strippers, phone sex operators, peep show and webcam cuties being lumped indiscriminately into category “sex worker” with prostituted children of all kinds, women on the streets, in brothels, massage parlors, and outcall prostitution serves to deny justice to all of them, and purposefully so.
Strippers aren’t supposed to be touched. According to a strict by-the-book definition, that says to me whatever sexist problems there are with the consumption of women’s images, it’s not the same as violating the physical and sexual boundaries of women. Sweden still has a few strip clubs, and while it may be ideally anti-sexist to shut them down, the main problem being focused on is stopping men from raping the bodies of prostituted women and girls in massive numbers. That’s where the most pressing concern is and that’s where Sweden’s focus is.
Strippers mostly say they would like to do anything else but strip for the same money, but they know that’s not coming so at least some protections from tricks and manager-pimps are what they seek. That makes sense.
Prostituted people interviewed around the world overwhelmingly want out of prostitution, period. They do not want protections to keep turning tricks, and they do not want unlimited access to antibiotics, abortions and painkillers. They want out. Now.
To speak of stripper and peep show “sex workers” as if their jobs can be regulated in the same way street and brothel prostitute “sex workers” can be regulated is an intentional obfuscation that serves pimps, traffickers, and tricks. Most people have seen strippers by going to strip clubs or watching The Sopranos and other porny media, while most have not seen a 9-year-old South African girl with lesions on her faces sucking an old businessman’s dick (true example from an article I read.)
There used to be no such thing as 13-year-old sex workers, and thanks to the paid pro-pornstitution liars promulgating this perception many media articles now refer to prostituted children as “sex workers” instead of victims of serial rape-for-profit. Thanks for the creation of category “child sex workers”, ye enBrightened ones.
At a recent conference I had the pleasure of hearing an ex-hooker anti-prostitution black woman confront a blonde, white sex worker rights woman who called for jobifying regulation. Her main point was that pretty blondes get the big money and strip club jobs while she and her black sisters worked the streets and crack houses. The white blonde’s calls for regulation and career-making out of their relatively privileged sex work circumstances denies the reality of minority women’s experiences in prostitution, ugly realities ignored the way black women are usually ignored. I wish you all could have heard the roomfull of survivor and social worker black women cheering their outspoken sister on.
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henderson says:
I keep saying, henderson, ‘quelle surprise?’ 68% of men, you say. But not my husband, boyfriend, father, brother, son or friend. Neither dishonesty on the part of men nor denial on the part of women are very helpful overall. Much effort goes into preserving an ideal of fidelity that largely doesn’t exist.
Not sure what you mean with all that first part. Except for that last sentence. That part is for true. But I like the ideal of fidelity and loyalty very much, though. They are two of my most favorite human triats in the whole wide world.
I heard that about 68% from a study somebody did. I don’t know if it’s true. If not- I do think that it’s probably somewhere in that nieghborhood. I think for most women it makes them uncomfortable to say the least.
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henderson says:
But not my husband, boyfriend, father, brother, son or friend.
Be careful on the personal stuff Cicely, what you don’t know about me is alot. I see a couple of names in there that if i told you -you’d know why I’m such a nut. And a couple of other names in there that are the reason I am still alive.
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henderson says:
I could be wrong but I think that some strippers would rather prefer to do a burlseque type of performance. The choriography, dancing and the like can be quite the difficult art form. Some of these ladies spend alot of time on their costumes, make up and dance routine. I think they would not like have to be turned into hands on prostitutes. A four foot rule would have helped- but the clients and club owners want to turn them into what they do not want to be. And do what they do not want to do. Just blabbing here…
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henderson says:
While we’re sharing.
My cousin was a stripper. She was great at it too. That lady could dance like nobody’s business. The clients and club owner treated her like a prostitute They treated her like filth. But she wasn’t. She was the salt of the earth. Her self esteeme began to suffer. One night she walked out into the parking lot of the club after a particularly rough night and took out her hand gun and killed herself. She had two children.
and that’s just one story. the one a person can repeat in mixed company. and that was a nasty one. They get even nastier ifyo can beleive it. but they don’t have to. Life doesn’t have to go that way.
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henderson says:
you see, I don’t know why people saying rude things to you makes a person feel bad. I dont’ know why having man after man paw at you night after night makes a person feel bad after a while. I dont’ know why a woman feels bad when her husband goes to strip clubs and does those things to another woman. It could be stigma. or social conditioning. But I think and I don’t have proof, that it is coming from something even deeper than that.
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Victoria says:
Sam, thanks for that powerful anecdote. That’s where it’s at. It’s not just “divisions between women in the sex industry, and women who are not in the sex industry” that serve to support patriarchal subjugation of all women as a class, it’s also the divisions between individual women, and between variously defined groups of women, in the sex industry (e.g., strippers vs. street walkers) – not to mention between adult women and youth (and to take it a step further: between adult women still in the industry, after having entered as youth). There are highly relative gradations of privilege and deprivation to be found in each of these stratifications. The role of racism as a primary (not at all ‘incidental’) contributing factor in developing and maintaining these hugely destructive hierarchies is hardly ever examined in such a critical manner, as did that survivor at that conference (which I sorely wish I could have attended).
Though yet another distinction could and should be made here: it may not be as true that racism’s role in all this is “hardly ever examined in such a critical manner…” as much as it is true that such critical examinations are hardly ever heard; rather, they are aggressively censored by those within pro-sex-industry circles who have visibly vested interests in the profoundly racist and classist (in addition to sexist…) status quo.
Now, to get back to one little morsel of bullshit from further back in the thread, the commenter at #38 who opined thusly:
In fact, the ONLY thing I have against Feminazis is that they are mostly dykes who hate ALL men and blame men for every injustice, real or imagined.
This made-up term you are using, “feminazi,” would not be in your patriarchal privilege ‘knapsack’/arsenal were it not for the propaganda-production and promulgation efforts of one Mr. Rush Limbaugh. (Is that who you align yourself with, Paul?)
This term has been used to silence feminists (and women, period) for years, and it’s really tiresome. As for your throwing of the proverbial D-bomb, “dyke,” you might wish to consider that this, too, is a term of most egregiously sexist and heterosexist abuse when dispatched with that particular dismissive snarl of yours.
Are you white, Paul? If so, are you also in the habit of dismissing the collective body of, for example, Afrocentric political theory by offering helpful distinctions such as, “Well, it’s not these black folks I have a problem with – it’s all these [insert racist epithet here]s!”
I have no problem with men who want to contribute to the collective process of consciousness-raising and constructive debate around feminist issues, including the issues of prostitution, pornography, stripping, and everything else that has been under discussion here. Lots of good men are doing this, and I appreciate this. (What I appreciate even more is when such men don’t expect a fucking medal in return for said efforts.)
But, between your sage advice (already confronted by Violet) at comment #18 that women wishing to stop patriarchy should “just stop having babies,” and this bullshit around “feminazis” and “dykes” hardly fits into that category of thoughtful, earnest, consciousness-raising and debate.
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henderson says:
Lots of good men are doing this, and I appreciate this. (What I appreciate even more is when such men don’t expect a fucking medal in return for said efforts.)
Thousands of blessings on your house Victoria.
that thing about racisim and hierarchies and sexism. Oh boy! that’s a whole huge deal into itself. So true. The industry opperates on and exploites things inside men that are at the very lowest levels of humanity that lives inside them and sexualizes them. Or is it really sex? I dont even know why the men are doing what they are doing.
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Burrow says:
Finally posted my ditty here
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Sam says:
When I attend public events I usually bring my camera because I’m a good little journalist, but for events on prostitution I usually leave it behind out of respect for pornstitution survivors. When I walked into September’s conference in Toledo I kicked myself for not having the camera with me.
The very first thing my eyes saw were two tables set next to each other. The table with two blonde, white, youngish women was chock full of Annie Sprinkle and Nina Hartley DVDs, pro-sex work books, sexwork perfume, “Sluts Unite!” shirts, bumperstickers, glossy postcards, sex worker business cards, oodles of pro-john articles reprinted from librul media and not one, not two, but three professionally-made huge banners with American flag images and exclamation points declaring “Sex worker rights are American rights!” and “Desiree Alliance!” and “S.W.O.P!!!”
The other table had three black women sitting behind it, two of them elderly and one younger, and on the half-filled table were white, blue and pink photocopied pages and trifolds for anti-prostitution organizations and to send away for a documentary.*
Like I said, I’ve kicked myself for not having a camera every time my mind flashes to that opening image. The distinct racial divisions and obvious funding differences between the two tables was astonishing in its starkness.
*The documentary is by Brenda Myers-Powell, a former prostitute and advocate for the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. She is also the black woman from post 65 who confronted arrested pimp Robyn Few, the blonde sexwork rights woman from post 65.
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henderson says:
Sam,
you aren’t exaggerating even a little bit when you try so hard to show how this all works. When you use certain kinds of language it’s trying to show something. or tell a story. and I can see how you even tone things down greatly and leave things out just to keep it for mixed company.The real reality of all this is so dark and twisted as not even to be believed by the average mind. They’d think you were lieing or exaggerating to make a point if you tried to tell it.
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cicely says:
Be careful on the personal stuff Cicely, what you don’t know about me is alot.
Sorry if that was a bit clumsy, henderson. I meant ‘everywoman’s’ husband, boyfriend, etc, not yours in particular.
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henderson says:
I got to thinking about it and wondered if that was what you were meaning to say. I know what you mean. Have read it on blogs before too. Not my husband and so on. My private stuff I must keep to myself except for a little bit. So I can’t talk about my husband or father or anyone like that. I gotta keep it general and A. Nonny Mouse for the most part. I have my reasons and they are pretty good.
No offense taken. sorry to be rough with you. After I got thinking, I figured it was a misunderstanding maybe. Blessings on you, angel. Now you go on out there and get ‘em Cicely. did you read Burrows blog? We’re going to get you to “salt” those strip clubs and unionize those girls. By golly. I’d do it but I wear a too small sized Brazil. er.. Brazier that is.
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Violet says:
Sam, that is an astounding image from your comment 74. What a dichotomy. Yes, I think we should all sort of contemplate that for awhile.
As it happens, that dichotomy also sort of coincides with what I’ve been trying to formulate as the difference between anti-p and sex-pos feminists regarding sex work. There are profound differences in theory, etc., all that, but what I’m realizing right now is that much of the difference is in where each side is focused. In a nutshell, the anti-p side is focused on the present (grim reality), while the sex-pos side is focused on the future (theoretical possibilities). And these respective foci tend to color how we view the whole issue.
To elaborate: anti-p fems are very much involved in the real, existing world of sex work, which is for the most part pretty fucking grim. Sex-pos fems are very much involved in the potential they see for decoupling sex from the patriarchal baggage and re-imagining it as a perfectly destigmatized activity, in a world where people might choose sex work as a dignified and worthy career.
These opposing perspectives make it difficult to appreciate each other’s point of view. Anti-p fems want to talk about the real situation today, which is largely horrible. And they’re deeply suspicious of the sex-pos idea that sex work could ever be anything but horrible and anything but a tool of the patriarchy, since that’s very much how it functions today. The Empowered Sex Worker myth makes them weep with frustration.
Sex-positives, on the other hand, keep trying to see past the patriarchy into their revisioning of sex and sex work. That’s why they always bring up examples where sex workers are apparently happy — a tendency that of course drives anti-p fems crazy (“How can you talk about the 8% when 92% are suffering, etc., etc.”). And to them, it probably seems that anti-p feminists are stuck in the present paradigm and unable or unwilling to see that what is being dreamed of is something completely different.
Those are very gross characterizations, of course. Just trying to provide a rude sketch here to illustrate the distinction, and trying to be reasonably fair to both sides.
So, here’s the thing: Perhaps a productive way for us to move past this dichotomy would be to allot the present grip on reality to the anti-ps, and the future potential to the sex-positives. We could say, “yes, the anti-p fems are pretty much right about how it is today. It’s a world of shit with tons of misogyny, and sex work today is generally NOT empowering. And we need to deal with that head-on, and not kid ourselves about the reality.” But: “The sex-positives have a legitimate vision for what sex work could be, and should be, a vision that might be exactly right, and worth focusing on as a goal” (or at least worth considering, for those anti-p fems who find it very rough sledding.)
Here’s what that might do:
1. For sex positives it would mean: listen to what anti-p fems are saying about the real current situation in the world. That’s the starting point.
2. For anti-p fems it would mean: listen to what the sex-positives are actually talking about when they describe their vision of a truly Empowered Sex Worker. That goal might very well give us a more productive agenda (productive in terms of generating actionable items) than the traditional No Sex Worker goal.
3. For both sides it would mean: stop fighting with each other, accept that you’re working opposite ends of the rope.
4. For all feminists it would mean: when we draw the lines this way, creating this possible trajectory, what do we learn? What do we uncover about the nature of sex work – how it is, how it must be, what is intrinsic to it? Fresh thinking and all that.
5. At the very least we could put our heads together to agree on short-term goals to help women NOW, while we continue to think out the long-term.
And for heaven’s sake, folks, I’m just thinking out loud here, trying to come up with new ways to look at this, trying to think about how we can get past the impasse. I have no idea if any of this makes sense or if I’ll even still agree with it tomorrow. I’m just throwing out possibilities.
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henderson says:
Women in business is a big deal with me. I think it’s been a huge help to helping ladies out of the sex trade around the world and giving them some power of their own. Real honest to god power. Empowering, as people like to say. I never met one single girl or abused little boy who wasn’t world class at something. For me and in the experience I’ve had on this, the sex trade is not an option. It’s something to help girls and boys out of. The difference can be astonishing and rather quick. I’ll leave all the unionizing of the sex business and the middle grounding to to the union folks.
The next time your’e somewhere in a far off country. Please don’t be an ugly tourist and “bargain” with the lady trying to sell you her stuff. what’s it to ya? $30 for some world class embroidary. You paid a grand to get to the damn country in the first place. Give her the $30. Blow that guide book that tells you to “barter”. There- that’s my tip for the day.
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cicely says:
Victoria and Sam – I appreciate that there are class and race and other divisions within the sex industry as there are everywhere, but it would certainly not be true to say that only white, monied-up sex workers around the world are advocating strongly and even desperately for their right to do sex work legally and safely. Where women are prostituting themselves out of economic hardship (which may or may not mean that they literally have *no* other choice) and that hardhip is not being alleviated by government social policy, and doesn’t look like being alleviated anytime soon, how can it be justified to make or keep their lives and work as difficult, dangerous and stigmatised as it is? These women are not *not prostituting* themselves, in whatever circumstances they’re in, despite the legal situation and working conditions, (and despite the 92% want out figure we keep hearing) and what would make anyone think that this is about to change?
What makes the experience of stripping or prostitution as soul destroying as it can certainly be? Is it the *fact* of it, or is it the conditions and the intensity of the ideologies – from the right and the left – around it? And who gets to say? How doesn’t keeping sex workers out on a limb, powerless and stigmatised targets for the rest of society – it’s opinions and it’s violences – feed as much into patriarchal ideas about women and sexuality as anti-pornography and prostitution feminists say the very existence of these occupations do?
This paralysis is certainly not helping anyone. Why is it not possible to empower, dignify and protect these working women in their real and actual lives, even as debate goes on? (On principle?) That’s what the New Zealand government has attempted to do by de-criminalising prostitution, and what I believe is the right thing to do.
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cicely says:
I hope you don’t mind my tranferring this excerpt from your comment at your place, Burrow. It fits in nicely with my comment above. You wrote:
So for now, I am all in favour of unionisation. But that’s only for right now. I imagine a world without strip clubs, where women are no longer the sex class.
Which brings me to other questions. Who would want to salt a place like that? (Salting is where you get union members hired into a job that you are trying to unionise.) I (years ago) thought about it, but I’ve definitely healed past that point and can’t shield myself from the degredation and humiliation any more. (Thank god. I am done dissociating. NO MORE.) Seriously, I have little problem finding people interested in salting Starbucks, but I couldn’t imagine asking any woman to salt a strip club. I’d even salt at (*retch*) Starfuckerbucks, but it’s different. I can’t imagine asking a woman to go through that for the good of a union.
It would depend on which woman or women you asked, wouldn’t it? I guess the situation is that you can’t find a unionised stripper to plant (does she have to be a stripper herself or can she be working in any capacity in the workplace?) because there aren’t any – (oh, what about the unionised Lusty Lady strippers you mentioned…?)
Most women, it seems to me, can’t imagine being sex-workers, and yet.
So you say you’re all in favour of unionisation for strippers. For now. Is there any reason you couldn’t extend this to all workers in the sex industry – eg in porn and prostitution as well? For now?
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Victoria says:
Folks, I’m just posting this to say that I’ve deeply appreciated the depth of dialogue that has been taking place here. Really, it’s been some of the most stimulating, authentic dialogue around this issue which I’ve been party to for quite some time. I kept up with it while I could, and am now utterly drained. There isn’t a word that I’ve contributed here that hasn’t been inexorably linked to a set of decisions I made, late in 1992, to assist a particular prostituted woman whom no one else – not in agencies, not in law enforcement, not in the medical community, not among nationally prominent feminist activists whom I had at least tenuous connections to at the time – no one else was willing to help, and I quite nearly paid for that decision with my life.
And I’m still paying for that decision. In nightmares (or sleep deprivation, my chief coping strategy for avoiding the nightmares). The dimensions of what I wound up having to endure because I, as one individual, chose to protect a single prostituted woman seeking to get out of the industry (and away from the organized crime-affiliated pimps who typically control same) – much less, of an entire caste of such women – are impossible for me to render here. Even though most of those events occurred in 1993, it was literally not until a few months ago that I was able to actually tell another human being even the most cursory details of one particular “siege” event during that period. (And I am not generally one to suffer for the inability to articulate myself with at least a modicum of comprehensibility.) Which, still, leaves a great deal untold.
None of us, of course, can ever be wholly objective about anything. So as I confess, here, my specific subjectivities, I’d like that to not be taken as handy ammunition by those who have decided to stand behind the prostitution, pornography, and affiliated industries (if not with their own genitals, then at least with their rhetoric), at such time as I am up to re-entering this discussion, in another venue (or at least at another time). I will say this: y’all might be surprised at the extent the extent to which I have areas of agreement – and vigorous disagreement – with the various “articles of faith” assumed by anti- and pro-sex-industry activists, respectively.
[Tangent: I really like what Violet notes in #78, after proposing various strategies: “…I have no idea if any of this makes sense or if I’ll even still agree with it tomorrow.” There is nothing as radical, here, as being willing to rethink one’s own deeply entrenched positions, no matter how righteously or logically those positions may have been obtained. We desperately need more people to be able to think like this.]
So, I’d like my newfound hesitation here (after, of course, this egregiously long comment) to be understood for what it is. I want to rethink my positions on all of these issues – from the back-and-forth found above on the (far more problematic than some will realize) issue of unionization, for example, to my own analyses, around the mechanisms of hierarchy, as these operate both within and outside the sex industries. I value, by far, facts over rhetoric – and I do not exempt, by any stretch of the imagination, my own rhetoric from that category of concepts and strategies which must be continuously challenged in relation to facts.
Violet has made impassioned, undeterred efforts to dig after some kind of common ground between all of us. I find that heroic, and I hope it doesn’t stop any time soon, but still I’m taking a breather. Not just in the interests of my mental health (and, you know, ever sleeping again), but also because it’s time I stopped fucking around and finished writing my books. (Oh yeah, and actually sending out already-complete manuscripts again. Which I haven’t been doing for an inexcusably long time.)
Cicely: You ask some pointed questions in your comment #80. Sam, of course, can speak for herself, but since my name was included with hers in the questions you posed, I want to make a promise to you, personally, that I will answer you, once I have the right words. But they have to be the precisely right words.
See, I’m not just filtering through my own experiences (and what I’ve witnessed); I’m at least as occupied with reviewing the collective body of theory and research on the sex industries, by folks on all sides of the issue. At least a quarter of my library consists entirely of books on the sex industry, by persons of every possible ideological persuasion. (That is to say, I have roughly 250+ books on the topic.) Not to mention all the activism and critical theory that is taking place online and in other collaborative contexts (like conferences). Which is not to say that I value re-theorizing everything ad nauseum, at the expense of feminist praxis; women in the most oppressed sectors of the sex industry need specific kinds of help yesterday, and I haven’t forgotten that (nor could I).
So I’m going back into my habitual hunker-down mode. I’ll have a more active online presence (here and elsewhere) when I’m done with what I have to do, which is going to involve the completion of many long-languishing works in radically different mediums (ranging from memoir and poetry to collaborative sociological research), as well as work toward developing truly ameliorative, justice-based direct service and legislative initiatives which have been on my proverbial back burners for some time.
That may take awhile. (For one thing, I don’t just have books and nonprofits to raise; I also have actual breathing children, the youngest of whom won’t be leaving the nest for a minimum of 12 years.)
I started this week with a post on my blog about my uncle who died six years ago, intending that I’d spend the days following in an at least partly meditative state about that particular loss, that I might come to some kind of resolution and then move on. Instead, I jumped right from that entry into a thousand fragmented conversations (here, mostly) about the unholy hornet’s nest [insert 'hive mind' metaphor here, Violet!] of prostitution politics, in the meantime, fully losing my grip even on matters of basic physical needs*. (My uncle, meanwhile, is surely laughing at me!)
Thanks to each one of you here for the constructive (not to mention hope-renewing) stimulation. Now, I’m off to my hibernation/percolation caves for a good spell.
Victoria.
*This pattern of radically disbalanced expenditures of energy, interspersed with nearly comatose silences, has been my unfortunate trademark for years. I’ve got to work on that. (Though at least, with this note, I’m altering the pattern somewhat, by offering some explanation first, rather than just silently going ‘off radar’ like I usually do.)
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cicely says:
Victoria – You have made a deep impression on me with the way you’ve approached this very difficult and complex subject and I want to thank you for everything you’ve shared here, and the way you’ve shared it. I may appear to be rather single-minded in my own approach, and I guess I am at this point, at least in terms of breaking out of paralysis and shooting to do something practical that I don’t believe can make things worse than they already are, if managed well. At least de-criminalisation (re prostitution) gives prostitutes their own place at the table, on more equal terms, whether they want to get out of the industry or not.(The NZ Prostitutes Collective was very much part of the discussion leading up to the law reform. You probably already know all this…) Obviously there should also be every possible kind of assistance to help those many who do want to get out. I don’t see any way that these two groups goals (those who want to continue in the industry and those who want to leave it) have to be mutually exclusive in real life, even though they may well be in some feminist theory or ideologies. During the course of the debate prior to the de-criminalisation of prostitution in NZ, the Prime Minister, Helen Clark, actually said something along the lines that the existence of prostitution is abhorrent, but she was still able to see the necessity of doing something concrete to try to improve the conditions under which prostitutes had previously been forced to work. She and I may well disagree about a future vision – as it happens, and so may you and I, but I will always be happy to discuss it with you whenever you’re ready.
cicely
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ginmar says:
Um, I’m still wa iting for somebody to take Will up on his idiotic comparing drugdealers to strippers schtick.
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cicely says:
gimmar – my gut response to Will’s comment when I saw it was a John MacInroe-ish ‘You CANNOT BE SERIOUS!!!’ – and the ball was definitely in. I did plan to address it, but it was a diversion from my chain of thought at the time, and then time passed. (a minute passed, another minute passed – another minute passed quickly past…courtesy Monty Python)
Here’s part of Will’s comment:
When you hear about a drug dealer getting shot, what do you think?
Poor guy had no choice but to get into the dangerous business?
or
The danger is what makes it so profitable?
Do strippers or prostitutes really need the job or are they trying to take a short cut for a bigger payday?How many strippers or drug dealers are in those jobs because they have to as opposed to because they want to?
Will – how many ways do you think this comment is indefensible?
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will says:
Because all strippers are forced to strip? How are they different?
Are they not similarly looking for a quick way to make money? (Not easy, but quick.)
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Violet says:
I just assumed he was being trollish.
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will says:
“I just assumed he was being trollish.”
Please explain.
Are all strippers forced into the business?
I’ve represented my fair share of strippers. Most were simply looking for a quick way to make good money.
I am not suggesting that there are not many forced to go into the business due to immigration issues or physical brutality, but I do not think it is fair to say that all are forced into the business.
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cicely says:
Because all strippers are forced to strip? How are they different?
I think the real question, Will, is ‘How are they the same?’ You appear to be putting prostitutes on the same moral plane as drug dealers in your comment. Is there *anybody* out there fighting for drug-dealing to be unionised and/or made legal and safe? (And I’m not talking about marijuana…)
When you hear about a stripper or a prostitute being raped and/or murdered, what do *you* think? That she was probably one of those who wanted to take a shortcut for a bigger payday in a risky and immoral business instead of working long and hard in a regular job like the rest of us and this is the price she had to pay? Because that’s what it sounds like.
As it happens I agree with you that there are women who strip because they can make better money in a shorter time than they could otherwise. Is there anything wrong with that? The money is quite possibly the major motivation for most strippers, and there is also an exhibitionist enjoyment and empowerment component for many (who I’ve heard speak for themselves).
Stripping – even under present conditions *shouldn’t* be dangerous. Danger money should therefore not be a component of the pay. Neither *should* it be a component of a prostitutes pay, of course, and actually it probably isn’t, though I couldn’t say for sure. I know it wasn’t for my famous little circle of friends. It was just the going rate, however that was arrived at.
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Sam says:
Let’s take this baby up a theoretical notch.
There’s a fascinating book by Thomas Kuhn called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn’s the guy who came up with the much-abused term “paradigm shift”, but there are good reasons why the book is famous and for me its outline of how revolutions happen was illuminating.
Basically, science is assumed to be based on hard data and solid theories, but if that were true then we would not see a succession of new scientific theories replacing old ones, a sun-centered universe replacing an earth-centered one. The data sets were almost the same (new technologies can reveal new data), so what accounts for the sudden sight of new scientific “truths” from observing what has always been observable? Revolutions in thought happen when the current frame of thinking – a paradigm – fails to effectively solve key puzzles in the data. A conflict crisis occurs and an “intellectually violent revolution” happens where believers in the old paradigm struggle against the changes newly seen as possible by the new one.
How does this apply to the terse debate over how to solve prostitution’s many harm-inflicting problems? Glad you asked! Kuhn talks about status quo resistance to change and believes conflict is crucial to working out new paradigms, and I think that’s why this debate gets so acrimonious and seems insolvable. In a way it is insolvable because we are operating from entirely different worldviews and accordingly look at the same data differently.
I would characterize the old paradigm as one that sees prostitution as a women’s problem and thusly suggests fixing women as the solution. Markers of this paradigm that circles around prostituted women are permits for women, STD & AIDS checks for women, condoms for women, panic-buttons for women, bad date lines for women, unions for women, “whore college” for women, etc.
It’s no shocker I believe the new paradigm is in drawing prostitution’s circle around tricking and pimping men. Markers are criminalizing tricking men, fining tricking men, “john schooling” men, tracking traffickers, punishing pimps, etc.
I would call the “key puzzle in the data” that legalization’s paradigm of building better prostitutes fails to fix is protecting prostituted women from men’s violence. According to the hypothesis, regulated legal prostitution should result in decreased violence perpetrated against women, decreased sexual slavery, decreased child prostitution, decreased crippling drug addictions, decreased STD & AIDS, and decreased trafficking. Legal prostitution theory is not holding true to its hypotheses any more than the blown-apart theory that the more users and more mainstream pornography gets the more woman-friendly porn and the porn industry will become.
Recent news from the Netherlands adds more fuel to the growing bonfire of the “fix prostituted women” paradigm’s death, ”the number of brothels in the Netherlands has decreased dramatically since they were legalised. The organisation notes, however, that the number of saunas and massage parlours has increased. It seems the illegal sector is growing.
My solution, coming from the “fix prostitute-(ab)using men” paradigm, would be the Swedish solution, but others are possible from this new vantage point. One element of paradigms is that they provide new ways of looking at problems, but do not provide all the solutions. They create the atmosphere from which new solutions can emerge after a creative roadblock has been hit.
Instead of the Swedish model, one could suggest tricking men be licensed and should have to openly register with governments in countries where they use prostitutes. Maybe implement a 5-hour course in responsible tricking similar to responsible driver or gun permit courses. Instead of brothels under control of pimps and madams, tricking men could be made responsible for providing a house, apartment, or hotel room to individual, independent sex workers.
Building better prostitutes is the old way of thinking about prostitution and it has failed to liberate women through centuries of theory testing. We need to unstick from the idea that men’s “need” for prostitutes is an immovable force of nature and therefore all you can do is fix prostituted women to withstand the elemental force of men’s appetites. Battered wives know there’s no such thing as building a dinner good enough to avoid attacks or keeping the house clean enough to please men into nonviolence. It’s not about the prostitute, meal, or house, it’s about communities confronting the male privilege that lets them get away with abusing wives, prostitutes, any and all women. We still inhabit a world where the dominant paradigm blames battered women for not leaving and asks rape victims what she wore, how pretty she was, what her job was, and so on.
True to Margaret Mead’s most famous axiom, Kuhn says paradigm-shifting revolutions are begun by a small group of committed persons. The paradigm’s ability to solve more of the problems, though not all of the problems, than the previous one ultimately determines whether the shift becomes a revolution replacing old truths with new truths. Unfortunately, these processes are crazy slow and the resistance to them often results in paradigm-shifters like Darwin, Copernicus, and Susan B. Anthony getting proper due for their foresight posthumously.
I’m excited to be living in the molasses thickness of a feminist revolution, and I’m trying to be more patient regarding prostitution evolution because I trust its time will come. I don’t work against legalization because I think it might someday work and prove me wrong, I do it because I hope to decrease the number of prostituted bodies piled up by the time everyone else figures out it doesn’t work and shifts to better solutions.
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will says:
cicely:
I thought the discussion was about groping strippers. Where did the rape and murder come into it?
Certain jobs pay more because of the danger or distastfulness to the job. I am not a fan of strip clubs. They are sad, pathetic places.
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henderson says:
Antifeminazi,
Whew, that’s alot of writage! Takes a great focus and long attension span. I have the attension span of a flea. Please, next time- just for the dopey ‘Mericans like me, bottom line that a little. Maybe add some explosions and car chases, maybe a love story. Next thing you know a person could get through it all. -
cicely says:
I thought the discussion was about groping strippers. Where did the rape and murder come into it?
With the opening line of your original comment, Will. ‘When you hear about a drug dealer being shot….’ You can see how that set up the rest of what you wrote, for me, by my response above. The gut reaction, which I didn’t write in so many words, was that you think strippers and prostitutes, *just like drug dealers*, get what they deserve when violences are committed upon them, because they’re mostly in it for the quick money.
I think you can perceive that I’m not the only one who read it this way. Maybe it was innocently clumsy, maybe it was trollish and maybe it’s what you really think. I leave it for you to say.
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cicely says:
Sam – I’ve printed off your comment to read during the day (it’s morning here), as I’m short of time right now and it requires some thought. And not just to disagree with you for the sake of it. All of this is too important. As improbable as it might seem, I sometimes think I could be you and you could be me in these discussions. The idea of focusing on the demand rather than the supply side of sex work has most definitely occurred to me as the way to deal with the clear abuses. I’ve pulled up at the point where it has to be decided what constitutes abuse and therefore what might be sacrificed that I think is important to preserve. Anyway – back later….
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will says:
the danger for drug dealers is getting shot; strippers get groped.
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cicely says:
When you hear about a drug dealer getting shot, what do you think?
Poor guy had no choice but to get into the dangerous business?
or
The danger is what makes it so profitable?
Do strippers or prostitutes really need the job or are they trying to take a short cut for a bigger payday?Sorry, Will, but it was you who brought up the shooting, and you who brought up the drug dealers and the prostitutes like they’re one and the same. Maybe you were just thinking it’s all part of the same seedy dangerous world and wondering whether – or assuming that – others probably think the same way you do about it. Maybe I should have just answered your question in the first place. No, the first thing that comes to mind when I hear that a stripper has been groped or a prostitute has been murdered is not ‘well, that wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t made the decision to take a shortcut for a bigger payday.’
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cicely says:
I’m not prepared (as in ‘not ready’ not ‘not willing’) to write an in-depth response to your comment yet, Sam, but just quickly – I actually applauded the Swedish initiative when I first heard of it for the exact reason that it marked a shift in perspective and put the focus squarely where it belongs – on the men who buy sex with anyone – mostly girls and women – without any care or consideration for how they came to be for sale. The Oz businessmen, for example who, as I’ve written here before, wave goodbye to their own 14 year old daughters as they head off to the Phillipines to buy cheap sex with someone elses daughter the same age or younger. Many of those girls, as you’ll know, are sold by poor rural families to ruthless sex slave-traders so the parents have enough money, for a while, to feed the rest of the family.
I’ve come up with wild ideas, like men having to sign registers and sight legal sex worker certificates, (certifying age and health) and have tickets to keep to show they’ve done so that have to be produced on request by authorities. (This could only happen of course if sex workers themselves cannot be prosecuted.) I say they’re wild ideas because nothing I’ve come up with so far is workable. But I’m sure prepared to keep thinking.
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will says:
I brought up that certain jobs pay more because of the particular danger involved in that job. I never said anything about strippers or prostitutes getting murderer or raped.
I am not trying to imply that they deserve it.
What I am saying about the 4 foot limit is that it is a difficult balance between offering something different from what they can see for free on the computer and the safety of the strippers. Part of the reason that strippers can make good money is the horrible situation that they put themselves in. You are constantly balancing titilation and safety. ie: i want to make you want to touch, but not let you touch. So that line is always being tested.
Put a stripper behind a glass screen and make men stay 10 feet away and see how much money the stripper makes.
If someone can figure out a way to make strippers safer, great.
As far as prostitutes or drug dealers go, neither one should ever get assaulted or murdered.
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Sam says:
I actually applauded the Swedish initiative when I first heard of it…I’m sure prepared to keep thinking.
Do not be seduced by the dark side. Easily it flows, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will. Not stronger, only quicker, easier, more seductive.
I look forward to your feedback.
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cicely says:
Well, I passed my test re commenting and got other stuff done, (hooray for me!) but have still been reading and thinking about this issue over the week. I feel kind of impatient to get to the future vision you’re trying to get out of us all, Violet, but I can’t put discussion of how to help the women on the front lines now aside to get there. Too many unanswered questions. ‘Where to start?’ is another one.
I’ve chosen for now to put a spotlight on the 92% or thereabouts of prostitutes who are said to want out. I think it would be useful to talk more about them. Who are they and why are they not doing something – anything – else? (I’m assuming that trafficked and otherwise physically co-erced sex workers are not included in the figure and I want to avoid conflating voluntary and co-erced sex work.)
The obvious answers are that they are economically disadvantaged women mainly ( but also men and transexuals), but could many of them access other types of work if they chose to? What does ‘want out?’ actually mean in prostitution, given that many, many people ‘want out’ of their jobs, if only they could win lotto!
Other work options are going to be more available in some countries or places than others, I understand, so maybe we could concentrate on the places where there are the greatest number of alternatives. If the choice is say between working in a factory or a supermarket or fruitpicking or prostitution, why is prostitution chosen, and why is it ‘able’ to be chosen?Given that women continue to do sex work under all kinds of legislative regimes and working conditions I think we have to concede that prohibitive laws have very limited impact if eliminating prostitution is the goal. I’d say this also about the Swedish approach of prosecuting the purchasers of sexual services and not the providers. Street prostitution may have been significantly reduced, but where have those sex workers gone? To other types of work? I know some are travelling to Norway to work and others are making far more use of the internet and mobile phones. What’s happened in Sweden really is that the burden of protecting the identity of the clients now rests more heavily with the prostitutes than it used to (in order to protect their income). It’s completely their responsibility now, in fact. Discretion has always been part of the service – generally speaking – but now it’s become even more necessary, and the work, correspondingly, probably more dangerous. Also, accurate data about what’s really going on, it sems to me, is going to become more and more difficult to obtain as a result of this law.
What I’m leading to is that, *in purely practical terms*, prostitution is work many women do and will continue to do under virtually any circumstances, so how can anyone even *hope* to improve their actual, real life situation by any other means than complete de-criminalisation of that work? And, again, in practical terms, why does anyone think that the goals of women who want to continue doing sex work and the goals of women who definitely want to leave the industry (but haven’t yet) have to be mutually exclusive?
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Sam says:
A holiday fruitcake to the first person who guesses how I’m gonna start my reply to cicely’s latest post when I write it tomorrow.
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ehj2 says:
Dear Sam (101),
As a consequence of the law which says, “The more we know and have, the more we are accountable,” I am guessing as follows — “with a generosity of spirit that is commensurate to the level of certainty you attribute to the knowledge you intend to share.” To do otherwise would be an abuse of the gifts you have.
/ehj2
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Mandos says:
You know, not everyone thinks that a fruitcake is a prize.
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henderson says:
I like fruit cake. but have no idea how you are going to reply. Humourously is always good. But sadly, little humour going on here. A little like France, someone cracked a joke once in the 1960s. and even THAT time it was an Englishman. And nobody laughed.
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henderson says:
I’m kidding for heavens Sake. Just being frisky.
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henderson says:
Good luck to you Sam girl. I’m pulling for ya.
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henderson says:
No bad bads cicely. You’re good with me. We love you. But i gotta root for Sam. You got your substantial cheering section. So all’s well. Sam’s the underdog.
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Sam says:
Rhetorical fruitcakes taste better than real ones.
You know what’s said, ehj22, about history and the rarity with which well-behaved women affect it.
”I’ve chosen for now to put a spotlight on the 92% or thereabouts of prostitutes who are said to want out. I think it would be useful to talk more about them.”
Cicely, I’m getting the feeling the mental roadblock preventing you from ripping your male-induced gaze off sexy sexed hookers is bigger than my 18-wheeler can deliver its goods over.
Prostituted women have been focused on whole lotsa bunches. Think of how pornography broken down means “writings on whores” but there’s no common word for writings about wives or mothers (wifography, materography) or writings about any other female-dominated work (secretarography, nurseography, midwifeography, etc.) We’ve got oodles of pornography and we’re long overdue for serious contributions to johnography.
”What does ‘want out?’ actually mean in prostitution, given that many, many people ‘want out’ of their jobs, if only they could win lotto!”
Howzabout wanting out as in the suicide rate among prostituted women is through the fucking roof as suicide rates go? One NY hospital, I want to say Beth Israel, estimated 15% of all suicides they saw were prostitutes. Most brothels have bars on the windows not to keep rapists out but to keep rapees in. The voluminous Swedish report that instigated the anti-john law infamously tells the story of a Swedish prostitute who killed herself jumping out a high-story window. Joss Whedon’s “Firefly” series and the movie “Serenity” give some pains that are worse than death through the man-like Reavers who are rapists and cannibals.
It’s insulting to say prostituted women want out of prostitution like you want to win the lottery. People aren’t literally dying at a chance to win the lottery the way women running from their pimps are dying at a chance of escaping sexual slavery.
There is no justifiable reason for you to claim ignorance about the lives of prostituted women. You have been engaging in this debate for months and supposedly investigating the sex industry and increasing your knowledge with the numerous offered resources in the meantime. You have been pointed to the incomparable research collections Prostitution, Trafficking, and Traumatic Stress and Not for Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography and you have chosen not to read them. You also did not view any of the pornography you posted here as examples of “feminist pornography” before deciding they were worth promoting as feminist, you simply took a Penthouse-established pimpographer’s word for it.
There is no reason for you not to be aware of the successes of the Swedish model given that there are resources available to answer the questions you pose but obviously haven’t earnestly sought answers to, today as in the past when you asked the same questions. Where have the Swedish prostituted women gone? Not to Norway or to a mythical underground place tricks can readily find but police can’t. According to very credible reports ”60% of those who were in prostitution are now out of prostitution and in other activities, whether it is employment, education, counseling, whatever it may be.”
There is no reason for you to keep ignoring men’s roles in the creation of prostitutes. Stop ignoring men. You write, “Given that women continue to do sex work…” when what you should have written is “Given that men continue to make women do sex work…” You write of sex workers in Sweden protecting men to protect their income as if there were no such thing as pimps or traffickers. Pimps and traffickers are real, Cecily. Hookers get to keep the money tricking men give the way Wal-Mart cashiers keep the money given to them; largely they don’t.
Pimps are traffickers are real, cicely. How do I make this fact stick in your selective memory? You conveniently keep forgetting about pimps and traffickers, about the men who make whores out of girls who grow into women.
”in purely practical terms, prostitution is work many women do and will continue to do”
Prostitution is not work, it is sexual slavery in almost every case, and there ain’t nothing practical about it. It’s enormously impractical because of the devastation to women, native peoples, communities, marriages, men’s health, children’s development and equal relations between men and women, darker people and lighter people globally, and for what? Money for men’s choicest cuts of pussymeat during the small window of opportunity before the big fall, or leap, out the window? That’s the good you think comes from prostitution and you think should be protected in the face of the bad that comes from prostitution?
In this very thread, post 90, I pointed out a news report saying Amsterdam’s illegal sector is much larger than its legal sector. This week Amsterdam officials are shutting down a third of the legal brothels because of organized crime and the growth of illegal prostitution in Amsterdam. The lie that legalization keeps prostitution from going underground while the Swedish model grows illegal prostitution is bullshit you keep on repeating with no evidence and no logic to support the assertion. Men don’t want sex with clean, permitted sex workers, they want to sexually abuse dirty little whores. Nothing, and I mean nothing, grows child prostitution and the illegal sector of prostitution like legalization and decriminalization affirming men’s right to access bodies sexually grows the illegal prostitution industry. You have to be deaf, dumb and blind to not connect pornography’s increased permissibility to prostitution’s increased permissibility to prostituted slavery’s explosion globally these past 15 years.
Are you able to learn new facts that don’t fit your pro-john philosophy? Do you understand why not reading the books or reports that would answer the ho-centric questions you keep asking over and over again in these debates make me question if you’re a little new-info challenged or just extraordinarily, compulsively, myopically fixated on keeping whores available to men for some benefit you speciously determine outweights the drawbacks?
why does anyone think that the goals of women who want to continue doing sex work and the goals of women who definitely want to leave the industry (but haven’t yet) have to be mutually exclusive?”
Because it has fuck-all to do with women and what they want and everything to do with men and what they want. The men you continue to ignore. The men who continue to rape prostitutes whether they’;re legal or not. The men who abuse legal strippers. The men pimping women. The men trafficking women.
The men
The men
The men
Men men men men men men menYou know, men.
Try with all your brainpower to hold pimping and tricking men in your thoughts through the building of your reply. How many more times do I have to point men men men out to you before you see them standing there with their manly hands around prostituted women’s throats, their manly penises raping them into broken-willed obedience for the use of tricks and for the sheer fucking fun of it?
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henderson says:
Don’t give them any new ideas Sam. Johnography.
It was a dark and stormy night. My girlfriend of 7 years was visiting her sister in Denvonshire. and I had the 7 yer itch… I heard of this place downtown with girls from the Ukraine and I had some kinks to let loose.
Blank eyed girls. They were talking, but they were far, far away at the same time- in the eyes..
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henderson says:
The things Sam leaves out are unspeakeable. Yet she leaves them out out of kindness so no one needs a therapist after reading them. and the therapist would need another therapist to help them after hearing the first.
Dare anyone say it? No they do not. The mind of man can be horrendous. the stuff that goes on. The kinks. It’s very sick stuff. and common. more common than a person can imagine.
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henderson says:
Whcich brings me to my eternal question. Why? Why? Why? I feel like crying when I type it. Why are so many guys willing to let themeselves go so far? Isn’t there something inside them that frightens them? Why have they allowed themselves to get so perverted? I used that word. perverted. and I’ll use another one that isn’t PC anymore. Degenerate.
How did that develop inside your head and why let it go to the point of acting on it????? -
henderson says:
Excuse me, lost it.
Please before anyone accuses me of being the moral police. i was talking about the unspeakable again. Not what goes on in your personal bed between you and your lover. So help me, I couldn’t give a rip.
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henderson says:
Violet! Is it like my eating meat and not even thinking about all the unspeakable things that happens to the animals????? Is THAT it??? Is it???? Would some wise person tell me????
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cicely says:
Prostituted women have been focused on whole lotsa bunches.
This is not the same thing as being listened to though, is it? This is part of an article by Jo Weldon which in full tells how she, as a sex worker, was first invited and then ‘uninvited’ by Janice Raymond to speak on a panel at NYU concerning the trafficking of women. Raymond and her colleagues in the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women ( which is also a prostitution abolition organisation) said that Weldon had an ‘experiential advantage’, and her presence needed to be balanced by the presence of a ‘survivor of prostitution’. Weldon had no objection to this, but the upshot was that neither of them got to speak as there were only four places on the panel and three were already confirmed. Two were prostitution abolitionists and the other:
upholding the International Labor Organisation’s recommendations (that sex workers benefit more from having their jobs regarded as a form of labor than they do from having sex work regarded as a form of violence against women) was the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women.
Here are Jo’s opening remarks:
I find it tremendously difficult to speak publicly as a sex worker. Not only did I spend months discussing it with my family before I began doing it (I have their support although it worries them for the same reasons it worries me), but it frightens me. Unlike “survivors of prostitution” who are describing their horrible experiences in sex work (they describe some of the very intolerable conditions that I, as a sex worker advocate, hope to alleviate), I am still working.
Because I am still working, am not repentant (not a “good girl”) about my work, and am speaking as myself, I have no idea what risks I am taking when I speak. I know that I will not be protected by my convictions. Will I be persecuted by stalkers who consider me a filthy whore or a traitor to my gender? Will I be discredited because I do not regret? What will be the consequences for stating that I continue to work in what is currently, in many locations, an illegal profession? To what extent can my privacy be invaded now that I seem to be a public figure? These are just a few of my concerns.
I know when I speak that the stigma I describe will be applied to me even as I describe it. I may be seen as deluded, weak, amoral, uneducated, lazy, a crank, insensitive, or simply stupid. Speaking publicly as a sex worker (and, I assume, as a survivor) is, frankly, somewhat traumatic.
However, I continue to do it, even though it is frightening and painful for me, because I feel that it is important that at least some of the discourse on sex work be conducted by those still working….In January of 2001 I was asked by sex worker advocates to speak on a panel at NYU concerning the trafficking of women (more on this event). I intended to discuss the evictions of prostitutes from legal brothels in Tan Bazar for “rehabilitation,” events which clearly showed that anti-trafficking activists and sex workers’ rights activists share a common ground in their concerns about the abuses to which many sex workers are subjected.
The whole 2 page article can be found at:
I have more to say in response to the rest of your comment, Sam, but I really would like to get away from this idea you project that you and I are in opposition about the facts of the abuses women suffer in the sex industry. We disagree on what to do about them. I am unable, in all conscience, to accept as true, as you do, the blanket statement that sex as work is violence against the worker perse, end of story. And, even if I did support the abolition of prostitution (which I don’t), I don’t envision this as practically possible until or unless the issues that place women at an economic disadavantage in the first place are effectively dealt with. As I keep pointing out, women (and men and transexuals) *will* do sex work under any legislative regime. Are they to be left out on a limb right up until a particular feminist vision has been realised?
Do you know whether there is any country other than New Zealand that has completely de-criminalised prostitution? I have written elsewhere that this needs to be well managed, and I am hearing the problem that illegal prostitution is expanding where the work is legalised. This obviously needs to be addressed. I don’t accept that there is only one way to address it though. I think making the industry more transparent (through decriminalisation and stigma removal) and targetting the men who use the illegal portion of the industry is the better alternative. I read somewhere that in Britain it has been suggested that it should be considered rape when a man purchases sexual services from any co-erced prostitute. I think this is a great idea. The onus should be on the client to establish that the service provider is working voluntarily. If he is in doubt, he should go elsewhere. I think we need to be imagining ways to move in this direction.
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Sam says:
“Prostituted women have been focused on whole lotsa bunches.”
This is not the same thing as being listened to though, is it?
Yes it is, and you would know that if you read any of the gobs of research quoting prostituted women, men, and transgendereds.
“I really would like to get away from this idea you project that you and I are in opposition about the facts of the abuses women suffer in the sex industry.”
If you had written that, “the facts of the abuses men commit against women in the sex industry” then I could agree. You didn’t, and because of that and more I don’t agree that you truly see men’s violence against prostitutes.
When I talk about abuses in the sex industry I connect men’s fists to women’s knocked-out teeth. You seem to think those teeth fly out of women’s bloody mouths without the help of men or else the only teeth you see are the gleaming smiles of .00025% of prostituted women.
If you truly saw the average 13-year-olds who are prostitution’s recruits you would not suggest the tricks/clients of 13-year-old victims should self-regulate so they don’t “accidently” rape children and slaves. Tricks don’t give a flying fuck about the girls beneath them. Rape victims sometimes tell tricks about their captivity and most either don’t care and tell her to bend over so he gets his money’s worth, or they care enough to fuck her gently before making a hasty exit with the hope her pimp won’t think he’s going to do something stupid like try to help her.
“As I keep pointing out, women (and men and transexuals) will do sex work under any legislative regime. Are they to be left out on a limb right up until a particular feminist vision has been realised?”
This line of reasoning was effective when I used it a few days ago regarding your whoring-is-work fantasy in the face of the overwhelming majority of prostitutes dying to get out of prostitution. The script flipping tried here fails because sacrificing the 90% majority of prostituted slaves for the (generously) 10% minority of whoring-ain’t-so-badders is indefensible. That’s why I win these debates, because this reasoning is indefensible to people with their eyes wide open, not because I’m a supergenius or anything like that.
If he is in doubt, he should go elsewhere.
You go on waiting for tricks to “voluntarily” pull their dicks out of 13-year-old newbie hookers. I’ll be over here steadfastly trying my hardest to pull clueless people’s heads out of their asses about the misogynist motivations behind prostitute (ab)using men.
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cicely says:
Sam, no-one arguing for decriminalisation of prostitution and the recognition of sex work as labour (including the 2001 UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women) is intent on sacrificing anyone. I know that you know this.
The political position that involves sacrificing any women at all is the one that says all prostitution is violence against women and therefore cannot be legitimated in any shape or form or for any reason, including for the physical protection (let alone dignity) of those who will do this work under any legislative circumstances and for their own reasons, which in many cases and in many parts of the world *will* be for economic survival.
It is the utter inflexibility of this position that prevents feminists from working together to develop specific and effective strategies against the traffickers and the pimps and all the other types of abusers in the sex industry. This obviously includes the men who give no thought to, or simply don’t give a shit about the particular circumstances of the girl or woman they’re fucking and for whom I have nothing but contempt, you can be assured. I want to see all the abusers criminalised and targetted, and that includes the estimated 25% of people actively involved in the trafficking of girls and women for genuine sexual slavery who are women. I don’t know how accurate that estimation is (I saw it somewhere recently and was shocked), but whatever the actual number they are no less guilty than the men.
We must be able to make a clear distinction between what is and what is not co-erced prostitution, and for that we need to take the cue from the women (and men and transgendered people) who are actually doing the work.
As I said in a previous comment I see no reason why the goals of women wanting to continue doing sex work and the goals of women wanting to leave it behind have to be mutually exclusive. Your response to my question about that was this:
Because it has fuck-all to do with women and what they want and everything to do with men and what they want.
This is patently not true. If it was, *women* – including sex workers and feminists to boot – wouldn’t be having this seemingly interminable debate.I could more plausibly say to you that *your* position has fuck-all to do with what women want and everything to do with what prostitution abolition feminists want. Which is all or nothing.
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Sam says:
Sam, no-one arguing for decriminalisation of prostitution and the recognition of sex work as labour (including the 2001 UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women) is intent on sacrificing anyone. I know that you know this.
I do not know this. I know that a pimpographer who made millions selling videos of prostitutes being prostituted without wearing condoms has positioned himself as a defender of whores’ rights to safer whoring. DKT International’s Philip Harvey got his start in the porn industry in the 1970s and now positions himself as a champion of whores’ rights. What he’s a champion of is keeping his prostitution profits rolling in just like Dick Cheney keeps Halliburton’s oil profits rolling in, through using his exploited millions to influence government policies that benefit him financially a lot more than they benefit prostituted women anywhere.
I cannot tell you how much I don’t care what the ILO, UN, WTSR, JSTPL, XYZ organizations you’re referring to have to say about prostitution. Manmade institutions, made for men and run by men, are not credible authorities on prostitution, the people in prostitution are. They say they want out of prostitution, not help staying in prostitution and all the condoms, abortions, antibiotics, painkillers, stitches, gauze, casts, and bandaids men are willing to provide to keep whores available to their brothers.
The political position that involves sacrificing any women at all is the one that says all prostitution is violence against women
I’ve never said all prostitution is violence against women. I’ve said that for upwards of 90% of prostituted people it is sexual slavery they want out of and the needs of these people not to be serially raped counts for more than the 10% of hoeing-ain’t-so-badders. If you need more explanation on this, go read biting beaver’s post 90%.
It is the utter inflexibility of this position that prevents feminists from working together
Oh feminists are working together on prostitution, all right. Pornstitution ads in feminist media rake in thousands of dollars annually, which is why Bust is working with Bitch is working with $pread is working with Venus is working with On Our Backs is working with liberal feminist bloggers is working with Amsterdam’s tourism board is working with…
Beyond the part about feminists needing porn ad dollars to pay their media bills, feminists are like most Western women in that they need whores like men don’t because they need to be sexy like men don’t. Men go to strip clubs alone because they get manly power through interactions with strippers. Women go to strip clubs in groups because they get womanly power being seen by others in a strip club more than through interactions with strippers. Think of it like poledancing classes where the real point isn’t exercise but the ability to brag about taking poledancing classes.
Patriarchy demands sexiness from women, and if a woman is not physically sexy enough or wants to be respected for not being a whore who gets her tits out for the lads, she can pin hawt chix to her personage and siphon off some of their minstrelly sexiness for herself. Liberal feminists desperately need to be seen as sexy, but showing pictures of themselves sucking dick or fingering themselves makes them disrespected sluts and not career feminist material. Bringing porn to the librul treehouse gets feminists seen as sexy girls while retaining their dignity because only whores lose dignity, not feminists using whores to send the message “I’m down wit da mens using porn, prostitutes and strippers pleaselikeme.” Feminist writers know that if they want to be published they’ll shut their she-holes about men (ab)using prostitutes.
Of course, what radical feminists know is that it doesn’t matter how much porn or strippers you bring to the treehouse in the name of “smut” or “burlesque,” men aren’t laughing with women but at them. Liberal feminists foolishly believe they’re in on the joke where radfems know men think women are the joke. Liberal and radical feminists motivations on prostitution are not the same and getting liberal and radical feminists to work together is not my goal. Stopping men’s violence that gives prostituted women 40 times the death rate of other people and horrifically enslaves more women today than African slavery did 150 years ago is my goal. It would be nice if more Western feminists worked against men who use prostitutes instead of promoting prostitution as sex work in order to profit monetarily and socially, and I’ll do what I can to educate them, but my aims reach outside the small, insular realm of white, middle class, English-speaking feminists.
25% of people actively involved in the trafficking of girls and women for genuine sexual slavery who are women.
I’d love to get a source on that, not because I don’t believe it but because I do.
As I said in a previous comment I see no reason why the goals of women wanting to continue doing sex work and the goals of women wanting to leave it behind have to be mutually exclusive.
I refer you again to biting beaver’s 90% post above. If you haven’t read it yet I suggest reading it now. This post will be here when you click back.
“Because it has fuck-all to do with women and what they want and everything to do with men and what they want.”
This is patently not true. If it was women – including sex workers and feminists to boot – wouldn’t be having this seemingly interminable debate
You need to drop this cavil, cicely. It is Western, white, middle class, feminists who are having the debate, which is amazing in itself when you consider how great the rewards are for selling out the world’s 35-40 million prostitutes and how few in number and reseource-power antipornstitution feminists are compared to their better funded pro-john liberal sisters. Sex workers themselves are not anywhere near divided on how horrendous prostitution is and how much they want out of it. I’ve mentioned it in about a dozen threads now that in a moment of undeniable truth sex worker rights leader Carol Leigh said, “95% of my friends want out of prostitution.”
No one wants to be a whore, but some settle for being a whore because they’ve had it beaten into them that it’s all they’re good for and the best life has to offer. They know their price but don’t know what their worth, and I believe prostituted women and girls are worth infinitely more than the price men pay to use them as targets for their misogyny and semen. I want better than that for myself, and if I want better for myself than I’d be a NIMBY hypocrite to not want the same for all women because there but for the grace of goddess go I. 90% of prostitutes say they want out of prostitution immediately and I intend to honor them by doing what I can to help them get out like they say they want out.
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henderson says:
25% of people actively involved in the trafficking of girls and women for genuine sexual slavery who are women.
I don’t have any studies or anything, but in my own personal experience I believe it too.
Beaver girl. You’re alright. No one can take anything away from you. No one can touch you on the inside no matter what. No matter what. You’re perfect on the inside.
It’s interesting also at what point in a girls’ life they will give a different answer if you ask them about this. Or even on which day you were to ask them. I’m not buying the happy hooker thing for this reason. That answer is going to vary alot depending on many factors. Lotta serious and deep psychology going on.
and the pornstitution people have a tremendous lobby.
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ehj2 says:
As a male, I have no voice here in this profound conversation about this open wound, caused and maintained and justified by men.
So I am not here and I am not saying anything. There is just this note of gratitude on a piece of parchment that will vanish in the fire.
~~~
Thank you for all you’ve written here, precisely and carefully and openly and with fidelity to the experience of your lives as you have lived them and known them.
It’s a lot of hard work to write this; it must be agonizing to feel it and let it flow through you, to see this everyday and confront it. Even though it might be an interruption to slip forward and place this note on a stone by the fire, it feels like an obligation to acknowledge this work, this painful music.
It is shattering to read what you have written, to hear what you have said. Even when your logic sometimes confounds me and I want to cry out in disagreement, I feel and honor the anguish in your experience so much it swamps me. Yet I cannot allow myself to be shattered or else I cannot move on and be of any help.
I’ve read and reread all of this. Now there is a hole in me that aches. Where before I was a rag and bone shop of the heart (a phrase from Rumi, a beloved poet and spiritual master), now I am less than that.
It is said in Zen that to increase in knowledge is to learn something everyday, while to increase in wisdom is to give up something everyday. During these days of reading you and meditating on your thoughts, I have given up much. Perhaps it would be more true to say that some things were torn from me.
I wish so much for you I do not have words. I will do what I can where I am to make the world better. I will remember this conversation and that I was allowed to listen here.
Thank you.
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cicely says:
I’ve tried to get to the 90% post at Biting Beaver, but my computer glitch thingy won’t let me. Violet, can I ask you that favour again of emailing it to me? I would appreciate it muchly.
Sam, I am keen to break down this 90 plus percent and try to get a true picture of the whole life situations of different women in the sex industry – but not just the sex work part. See, I wonder what would happen tomorrow to the millions who want out – if the whole world adopted the Swedish solution at once. What is keeping these women doing sex work now – where it’s not actual physical co-ercion – when they don’t want to be doing it? Can those factors be altered in the short term or how far into the long term?
My opposition to what I see as illiberal (?), repressive and anti-sex – even anti-female sexuality and economic empowerment – legislation – in the big picture and long term doesn’t mean I’m not also desperate for a solution to multiple rapes and other abuses of vulnerable people – mainly girls and women. I’m seeing a combination of the Swedish approach on the illegal section of the industry if there is a decriminalised component underlying it. Part of the decriminalised section would be assistance for women wanting to get out of the industry – as was proposed for that radio station, in India I think, which is run by prostitutes as an education and help service for sex workers.
Short post for now – work beckons…
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cicely says:
A little bit further to the above. In NZ there is a crime called ‘receiving’. People are charged with it who have been found to have accepted or bought goods that didn’t have appropriate receipts etc and have been stolen by someone else. A charge for purchasing sex from an illegally operating or trafficked sex worker might be something like ‘receiving -occasioning rape’. At minimum the mans name would be published and there should also be a consequence which may or may not involve prison. (To be discussed) The situation of the sex worker would be examined in terms of who is employing her, earning income from her etc, etc. and appropriate action would be taken. (persons charged etc.) If she is operating independently, or in any case, she would not be charged, but referred to a help service on the say first and maybe second offence. Her obligation, if she wishes to continue doing sex work, would be to register herself as self-employed, or become an employee of a legitimate business. Just brainstorming here….I’m not sure how to go about the registering and the verification, proof of sight of same by the client etc. Maybe others have some ideas. Maybe I could cast around and look for some on the net too. It seems to me we’re short of ideas we’re so consumed by the debates. But they could be out there somewhere.
I am in total agreement that the situation that men can act with impunity has to be tackled everywhere. As I’ve said, I applauded the Swedish approach for exactly that reason. I think they’ve done the world and women a great service by showing that it can be done and raising awareness that it should be done. I would just do it differently, although I obviously don’t yet know how.
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Violet says:
Cicely, I’ve emailed you the BB post (it’s about 5:30pm on Thursday here in ‘Murka).
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cicely says:
Thanks, Violet. I can’t get to the links in the email – I have no idea why some work and some don’t – but I’ve found out (some time ago actually) that $60.00 approx will fix this problem so now I’ll try and get it done v.soon.
I really think this 90% vs 10% thingy is very simplistic. I’ve been looking at some stats from a survey of prostitutes in Vancouver (from ‘Not For Sale’ by Lynne and Farley, the anti-porn view) and some from a survey of Australian prostitutes (the pro- decriminalisation view) which are interesting to compare. Add to the mix your 60% of pre law reform prostitutes who are now, according to credible sources, ex-prostitutes in Sweden, Sam, and put that up against an assertion at the swimw.org site that a high number of ‘rescued’ prostitutes end up returning to prostitution or working for the organisations that rescued them – good god, who or what is one supposed to believe? I think this is going to require some diligence to sort through.
I am in research and thinking mode right now, from the point of view of grasping reality, practicality and imagining solutions. I can’t promise not to say anything stupid as I’m rooting around, so to speak, but I feel confident that this will be pointed out whenever it occurs (which it may have already…)
I’ll return when I think I’ve got something interesting or useful to say.
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Sam says:
an assertion at the swimw.org site that a high number of ‘rescued’ prostitutes end up returning to prostitution or working for the organisations that rescued them
A quick look at the site didn’t reveal the source; can you be more specific as to where I can find the research asserting this?
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cicely says:
Posting a link to the actual page, Sam, but let me first say that I recommend anyone thinking about this issue go have a look at this article. Here’s another quote from it:
There is a war of credibility going on between prostitution-abolitionist activists who define prostitution itself as a form of violence against women, and sex workers’ rights groups and anti-trafficking activists who wish to combat trafficking separately from prostitution. Abolitionists are less likely to discuss women trafficked into the garment industry or agricultural industry. If you are a journalist investigating trafficking in women, do not forget the women and children working in slavery-like conditions in sweatshops.
The “war of credibility” described above is in itself bizarre and worthy of investigation. What’s really at stake? Why are organizations formed for the purpose of combating violence against and exploitation of women in conflict with each other?
Something I’ve been thinking about in relation to your figure of 60% of pre law reform prostitutes in Sweden now doing something else, Sam, is this. Sweden has a 70% female participation in the overall workforce and it’s possibly the most egalitarian nation with one of the most if not *the* most comprehensive social welfare systems in the world. Say they have managed a permanent 60% reduction in prostitution (and with this credibility problem I’d be foolish to just accept this as true), can you see this being replicated in Asia, or in many other countries around the world if they adopted the Swedish approach? And who are the 40% still in prostitution in Sweden? Even if this success was replicated around the world, 40% of millions is still millions. Millions driven further underground than they had previously been, with no advance whatsoever on the stigmatisation issue, which, it turns out, is possibly largely what’s behind the failure of the Dutch policy of legalising brothels. For example, banks wouldn’t approve loans to prostitutes wanting to set up legitimate businesses because it might offend other customers. (It has been said – *by* a Dutch prostiture ;)… The Dutch people may not be as liberal as they seem, overall. And we know that German prostitutes are still reluctant to register themselves as prostitutes because of the stigma still attached to the work. (so much for my solutions so far!)
I keep coming back to the stigma as a huge problem. It may be hard for some to believe, but I was watching a documentary about the women on the first women carrying convict ship of the fleet to Australia and part of the commentary was explaining that among the poor and working classes at that time in England there was absolutely *no* stigma attached to prostituton. It also said that, to a large extent, women from these classes at that time enjoyed an easy and open sexuality not unlike that of the men. Of course there was no contraception and women would still have had problems men didn’t have in male dominated society, but still. I can honestly say though, that as a mid twentieth century born working class woman, I’ve personally never attached a stigma to prostitution in my own mind, though I’m not completely immune to other peoples perceptions -as I’m not about being a lesbian when others are being assholes about it, although it’s hard to find a lesbian more happy and comfortable with it than I am. While I didn’t feel assertive or confident enough or whatever enough to do the whole thing (sex work) as a job, or even casually or part-time with another job (as many women do, to supplement their income), I did once let a 90 year old man touch my breasts for five minutes to make up a shortfall in my rent. A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do sometimes. I also once was hired to seduce a man’s wife while he peeked through a hole in the wall, but I was a failure at that too. I just sat and talked to her and didn’t get paid. Hopeless! It’s because I’m stone-femme, for those who know what that means. I believe that all that prevented me doing sex work back in the day, in all honesty, was my complete passive/responsive sexuality (which doesn’t make me a starfish by the way). I thought I had to bung on an act that I wasn’t up to. That was in my context though, in which my friends who did do sex work casually were in no economic way obliged to.
Well, enough about me, sorry to have rabbited on – it’s that morning ‘mind goes everywhere’ thing….
Here, finally is the link…
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Pony says:
I’m not Sam and I don’t have her special knowledge of the facts to counter the information here, but I am person who has worked as a reporter, and I recognize spin when I see it. This is spin, and I would put as much credence in this site and the ‘facts’ presented there were I a health reporter and received a similar document from a pharmaceutical company telling me why all my suspicions about conflict of interest were unfounded.
This is propaganda. Plain and simple, put out by someone with something to gain by our believing this crap. The writer, whoever she is, is not writing her first public relations press release masquerading as information. This is a very cleverly conststructed piece of corporate marketing dept crafted bullshit.
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cicely says:
This is a very cleverly conststructed piece of corporate marketing dept crafted bullshit.
Is it really? (my subtitle as a child. I was very gullible apparently, or I just enjoyed wide-eyed awe…)
I’m mostly pointing out that there *is* a credibility war, which you’re also participating in here. See, with the variously reported 89%, 90%, 95% of prostitutes surveyed (and which prostitutes?, under what circumstances?, what questions?, which surveys, conducted by whom and for what purpose…?) who want to get out of prostitution, aren’t there more questions to be asked? Like – ‘Why *don’t* you or why *can’t* you get out now?’ – and – ‘Why do you want to get out?’ ‘What is it about sex work that makes you want to get out?’ The answers aren’t all going to be the same. The intensity isn’t going to be the same. But it’s the easiest thing in the world to concentrate on the most intensely painful experiences in the industry, to tap into the shame and create an impression that this is what 90% plus of prostitutes feel. That would be spin too. In Farley and Lynne’s survey ( in ‘Not For Sale’), according to the report I read, written by another prostitution abolitionist, 95% of respondents in Vancouver said they wanted to get out of prostitution. But 32% supported legalisation or decriminalisation. The 68% who didn’t support it didn’t appear to have responded to the direct question. The writer seemed to have been quite careful about not saying so anyway, and if they had been, I’m sure there’d be no hesitation in reporting the desired answer. What was written instead was that they’d said law reform in that direction wouldn’t solve their problems. Is that what they were asked and about which problems? Racism? Poverty? Drug addiction? So, of the – let’s say it is 95% – of prostitutes who want out, around the world, what percentage is also actively opposed to decriminalisation? I often read inferences that they ‘don’t want help being whores, they want help getting out of prostitution.’ But how often do they themselves actually say both those things together – ‘I want out *and* I don’t want prostitution decriminalised.’ And how would this be verified? (refer to the above first set of questions and so on…)
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cicely says:
The short point I’m making is that this isn’t 95% wanting prostitution abolished versus 10% wanting it decriminalised, as it is commonly presented. (eg Biting Beaver writing that she doesn’t give a fuck about the 10%.)
No-one in this debate who isn’t a practicing misogynist wishes sex workers to suffer or is in any way arguing for unimpeded male access to women’s bodies at whatever cost to the women. We’re all looking for solutions, but based on different experiences and different sets of beliefs. It would be great if we could at least respect each others intentions and also the practical truths about what’s actually going on while we keep asking the questions that have to be asked.
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Sam says:
“an assertion at the swimw.org site that a high number of ‘rescued’ prostitutes end up returning to prostitution or working for the organisations that rescued them”
There was nothing in the link you provided to support this assertion. Got anything more substantial than “Because Jo says so”?
Also, I fail to see what me not being an expert on sweatshop labor has to do with reducing men’s demands for prostitutes to end sexual slavery and stem the multiple harms of prostitution. Looks to me like you’re suggesting I and others have (in your words) “a credibility problem” because we focus on prostitution instead of agricultural and industrial slavery, and if that’s the biggest credibility problem you can find with our support of the Swedish model of prostitution then booyah to us!
“Millions driven further underground than they had previously been”
Check your facts again, cicely. It is Amsterdam that has shut down red light districts and window brothels because they multiplied the criminal underground and produced a spike in gang activity and prostituted slavery via trafficking. Sweden’s trafficking problem has diminished to an extent unseen in any legalized/decriminalized nation. Less men’s demand means less need to supply fresh, exotic wet hole collections from Eastern Europe and South Asia.
“no advance whatsoever on the stigmatisation issue”
I remind you what I wrote in the Worms thread about legitimizing men renting the insides of women’s bodies:
This so-called legitimacy for sex workers you dream is right around the corner, what do you think it will achieve? Wives are legitimate, that’s why they’re elevated from girlfriends to wives, but their legitimacy hasn’t protected them from men’s sexual violence. To the contrary, the more men feel entitled to legitimately demand sex from legitimate sources like wives and whores, the less likely those women’s accusations of rape become. The transaction is legitimized by the man-made government and man-ruled society in a way women’s lives have never been legitimized. Wives are believed less when they accuse husbands of rape than co-workers and casual acquaintances making rape accusations. Rethink your flawed “legitimacy to buy sex” theory in light of such known truths about who actually benefits from legitimizing the various routes of sexual access men demand.
“And we know that German prostitutes are still reluctant to register themselves as prostitutes because of the stigma”
Where do you pull this stuff from? Seriously, I want to know how you draw this conclusion. A few hundred prostitutes out of an estimated 400,000 in Germany and you think, and think everyone else thinks, that stigma is more powerful at preventing prostituted women from joining Germany’s union than repeated rapes, slavery, pimp violence, being children, being addicted to drugs, and being trafficked illegally into the country?
One of the first stories I’d heard when embarking down this feminist path was of a 16-year-old Ukrainian girl found working legally in a German brothel. Her front teeth had been pulled out. You think stigma stopped that Ukrainian girl from joining a union? You think there aren’t many men willing to shove their dicks down the throat of a 16-year-old with her front teeth pulled out? Think again.
“See, with the variously reported 89%, 90%, 95% of prostitutes surveyed yadda yadda”
The questions you erroneously think none of hundreds of researchers over decades ever thought to ask sex workers have been asked. Many times, in fact. In many pieces of research done around the world. More reading should fill you in on your mistaken belief that no one ever thought to ask “Why do you want to get out?” or “Why can’t you get out now?”
“I often read inferences that they ‘don’t want help being whores, they want help getting out of prostitution.’ But how often do they themselves actually say both those things together – ‘I want out and I don’t want prostitution decriminalised.’”
First, decriminalization of the sort you’re asking is de facto legalization. There is no real difference between telling men they can have their whores via the government and telling men they can have their whores via anyway they find them.
Now, let’s take a look at some facts:
United States: 56% don’t want it legal, 88% want out now.
South Africa: 62% don’t want it legal, 89% want out now
Thailand: 72% don’t want it legal, 94% want out now
Turkey: 96% don’t want it legal, 90% want out now
Zambia: 92% don’t want it legal, 99% want out now
Canada: 68% don’t want it legal, 95% want out now
Colombia: 80% don’t want it legal, 97% want out now
Mexico: 49% don’t want it legal, 68% want out now
Germany: 65% don’t want it legal, 85% want out now
That’s 71% who don’t want prostitution legalized and 89% who want out now.
Particularly interesting about Germany’s numbers is that brothel prostitution is already legal but 59% of the prostitutes interviewed did not think legalization made them safer from rape and physical assault.
Prostitution is also legal in Columbia, and the age that children are legally allowed to become prostitutes is 14. Prostitution is legal in Costa Rica and the acceptable age of entry into prostitution is 15. Unsurprisingly, both countries have enormous problems with child prostitution and are hotspot destinations for child sexual predators from around the world.
I used to look at the same data differently, a lot like how you look at it as a matter of fact. Wanna see a younger, porn-using sexual health activist Sam call for for prostitution legalization before she’d read a single book on the subject?
I’ve read some books since. Every study on prostituted people I have ever seen confirms the results I’ve presented. Before disingenuously saying every prostitution researcher is biased, ever study done flawed, every sex worker interviewed an old African woman with advanced AIDS dying in a Catholic prison, I want to know what research you’ve seen that comes up with different results from what’s presented here.
I have never seen research that contradicts what I’m showing you about what prostituted people want.
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cicely says:
That’s 71% who don’t want prostitution legalized and 89% who want out now.
But I still have to ask ‘which’ prostitutes were surveyed (and, importantly, which weren’t), who conducted these surveys and for what purpose, don’t I?
How were the respondents contacted? Under what circumstances? How many prostitutes took part in each survey? What, exactly, were the questions asked?
Now that I’ve got started on this credibility issue, I want to go deeper into these questions. I’m also very interested to know the reasons currently working prostitutes give for an actual, active and unambiguously stated opposition to legalisation or decriminalisation, in their own words.
The difference between legalisation and decriminalisation is the level of interference by representatives of the state. I have to find it again, but I recently read that a good number of Dutch prostitutes are confused by and pissed off with the red tape around the legalised brothels. Not a few to the point of leaving the legal brothels to work in illegal ones. I am looking forward to seeing how the New Zealand approach evolves over time, (what changes will they make after next years appraisal…) not only in comparison to the Swedish one, but also in comparison to legalisation. I still haven’t become aware of any other country where prostitution is currently completely decriminalised. ( does anyone else know of any?)
Why do you suppose that Mexico, the US, South Africa, Canada and Germany – even with whatever flaws the surveys may have, report the highest percentages of prostitutes who are not opposed to legalisation or decriminalisation? (51%, 44%, 38%, 32% and 35% respectively.)
Sweden’s trafficking problem has diminished to an extent unseen in any legalized/decriminalized nation.
Trafficking people into sex slavery is a different issue than prostitution perse. I know it suits an anti-prostitution position to conflate the two, but it still doesn’t make them the same. Perhaps those victims are now being trafficked into other industries rather than not being trafficked at all.
No, I don’t have further information on the assertion on Jo’s site. She wrote that it was made by the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women but didn’t give a direct link to the original comment. I haven’t seen any satistics to contradict the ones you quote either, Sam. Statistic quoting doesn’t seem to be as common on the pro decriminalisation side of the debate, as far as I’ve noticed anyway. Political philosophy and the words of sex workers and their advocates make up most of their arguements. And you know the old saying – if the voluntary sex workers actually do only make up 10% of prostitutes, that doesn’t make them wrong. Minorities are always wrong – at first.
This is not a complete response to your comments, but it is approaching 4am, and time for sleep…
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Sam says:
“But I still have to ask about methodology”
I don’t know why you keep asking when the methodology is readily found. You can see for yourself how prostituted persons were found and the questions they were asked. Maybe you missed this debate over on punkassblog, but it was a big one so I assumed you’d gotten wind of it. It’s too bad the posts aren’t numbered, but my posts stop less than halfway through.
This is covered over at punkassblog in more detail, but I’ll donate $100 to the sex worker charity of your choice if you can produce some kind of prostitution research that contradicts what every piece I’ve ever seen says. It’s easy to call researchers liars, but to assume every researcher who has tried to gather empirical evidence to support the anecdotal evidence of hookers almost no one believes anyway (rape victims of all sorts are considered liars grom the get go) is really stretching.
“Trafficking people into sex slavery is a different issue than prostitution perse. I know it suits an anti-prostitution position to conflate the two”
There I go again with my fact-twisting, biased self just making shit up about sexual slavery and its relation to prostitution for the sake of a debate. I’m sorry you hate it when anti-pornstitution people insist that men’s inflamed demands for whores means those goldmine pussies will be provided by pimps by any means necessary and this results in the movement of poorer, darker, female bodies into wealthier, whiter, male institutions like strip clubs and other brothels, but there it is.
It’s also here in the title of a post announcing Canada’s recruiters for the prostitution industry going to Romania to supply sex workers for Canadian tricks and pimps: Canada Contributes to the Sexual Trafficking of Women for Purposes of Prostitution
Nope, no connections between trafficked women and prostitution to see here folks, move it along.
“Political philosophy and the words of sex workers and their advocates make up most of their arguements.”
Radical feminists and other anti-john folks have a more practically sound political philosophy, way more sex workers on their side, and we also have the statistical evidence to back it up.
As can be seen from my postings here and elsewhere (This Bitch Phd thread was an especially good example) I don’t need statistics to make the case against legitimizing men’s supposed right to sex on demand.
There have been many men I’ve known, and a few women, who wanted me sexually but I didn’t want them. Maybe you can think of some people you’ve known in your own life who wanted to fuck you but you did not want to fuck them. Can you go back and imagine you had to let them fuck you anyway and had to pretend to like it because they wanted it and they had the money to make you submit? Most people reading can’t imagine what that would be like, but for prostituted women it is the norm.
Imagine having to get fucked by a pro-life little shit of a computer science major who said he’s superior to Africans because he knows how to write a computer program and they don’t.
Imagine your right to say no was removed and you had to fuck every man who ever wanted to fuck you. That’s the reality of prostitution imposed by pimps, poverty, and addictions that goes beyond numbers.
The statistical findings about prostitution’s extreme deadliness (7x the homocide rate of male cab drivers) have been known forever and they have not in themselves done much good. The link above where I looked at the same deadly data while promoting legalization is personal proof but it’s everywhere in our male-apologist rape culture.
For me, everything changed when I stopped taking for granted that men’s sexual violence is an unstoppable force of nature on par with acts of God that you just have to throw your hands up and accept. When the simple but worldview-altering fact of men’s humanity dawned on me, I stopped rationalizing that boys will be boys and started to finally see the forest for the trees in the prostitution statistics I had soaked up but hadn’t considered from a trick’s eye view. In that moment of clarity a radical feminist was made.
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cicely says:
I think this excerpt from an article I’ll link to covers quite a lot of what we’ve been discussing in terms of the real situation for many prostitutes in Asia.
Economic Incentives Drive the Industry
While many current studies highlight the tragic stories of individual prostitutes, especially of women and children deceived or coerced into the practice, the ILO surveys point out that many workers entered for pragmatic reasons and with a general sense of awareness of the choice they were making. About one-half of Malaysian prostitutes interviewed for the study said it was “friends who showed the way to earn money easily,” a pattern that is replicated in the other study countries.
Sex work is usually better paid than most of the options available to young, often uneducated women, in spite of the stigma and danger attached to the work. In all four of the countries studied, sex work provided significantly higher earnings than other forms of unskilled labour.
In many cases, sex work is often the only viable alternative for women in communities coping with poverty, unemployment, failed marriages and family obligations in the nearly complete absence of social welfare programmes. For single mothers with children, it is often a more flexible, remunerative and less time-consuming option than factory or service work.
Surveys within sex establishments revealed that while a significant proportion of sex workers claimed they wanted to leave the occupation if they could, many expressed concern about the earnings they risked losing if they changed jobs.
Even so, the surveys also reveal that in the experience of most of the women surveyed, prostitution is one of the most alienating forms of labour. Over 50 per cent of the women surveyed in Philippine massage parlours said they carried out their work “with a heavy heart,” and 20 per cent said they were “conscience stricken because they still considered sex with customers a sin.” Interviews with Philippine bar girls revealed that more than half of them felt “nothing” when they had sex with a client, the remainder said the transactions saddened them.
Surveys of women working as masseuses indicated that 34 per cent of them explained their choice of work as necessary to support poor parents, 8 per cent to support siblings and 28 per cent to support husbands or boyfriends. More than 20 per cent said the job was well paid, but only 2 per cent said it was easy work and only 2 per cent claimed to enjoy the work. Over a third reported that they had been subject to violence or harassment, most commonly from the police but also from city officials and gangsters.
A survey among workers in massage parlours and brothels in Thailand revealed that “most of the women entered the sex industry for economic reasons.” Brothel workers were more likely to say that they became prostitutes to earn money to support their children, while massage parlour women were often motivated by the opportunity to earn a high income to support their parents. Almost all of those surveyed stated that they knew the type of work they would be doing before taking up the job. Almost one-half of the brothel workers and one-quarter of the massage parlour workers had previously worked in agriculture. A further 17 per cent of the masseuses said they had previously worked in home or cottage industries and 11 per cent had been domestic servants.
Sorry about the long address for the whole article – copy and paste into address bar…
/public/english/bureau/inf/pr
/1998/31.htm
As for the situation regarding legalised brothels in Holland, it is also more complicated than it might seem.
New Rights for Dutch Prostitutes, but No Gain
Prostitution has long been legal in the Netherlands, but now the nation is trying to invent
a system to regulate the industry. Nine months ago it legalized brothels.The new law is intended to help the police get a grip on the often suspicious world of
prostitution, basically a cash business that the police say is often used for money
laundering, arms sales, drug sales and the often brutal exploitation of prostitutes,
including minors and illegal immigrants.… the law is supposed to offer the more than 30,000 women who work as prostitutes in
the Netherlands the chance to get the basic labor rights, insurance policies and disability
payments enjoyed by other citizens. But the transition has been a bumpy one….
many experts are worried, too, that the new law is simply pushing a huge number of
prostitutes underground, where they are at greater risk of being taken advantage of. This
group includes illegal immigrants, who fear being sent out of the country if they register,
and Dutch citizens who are not ready to go public with what they do.“I have often doubted since we legalized the brothels, whether we did the right thing,”
said Femke Halsema, a member of Parliament who advocated the measure. “For me, it
was a question of emancipation and liberation for the women. But for now it is working
the other way.”…..
One of the women who has worked here (in a brothel which has lost most of its workers) for about 10 years said that some of the
prostitutes simply left the business because they did not want to lose their anonymity by
registering with the police and paying taxes.Others, she said, were still selling sex, but in a more dangerous way. They advertise in
local magazines and meet their customers in hotel rooms. To do this, most rely on a pimp
for protection.“I don’t see anything good about the law,” she said. “The whole thing is crazy.”
No one is yet calling for a repeal of the law. (at that stage – cicely) Most prostitute advocacy groups maintain
that the legalization of brothels will be a good thing in the long run. But right now, they
say, too little money has been spent on getting information to the prostitutes about how to
comply with and benefit from the law, or on campaigns to encourage community
acceptance.“It’s chaotic out there right now,” said Mariska Majoor, a former prostitute who runs the
Prostitution Information Center in Amsterdam’s red light district. “It’s not good for
anybody. Most of the prostitutes don’t have any idea where they are in all of this.”/csis/news/world_2001/nytimes-010812.html
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cicely says:
Here’s another one of those ‘morning brain’ thingy’s – about stigma. It’s a side issue to the above comment because it’s the meanings in those that I’d like to elaborate on in terms of the topic, but…
I realised that some of us in this conversation have a closer understanding of stigma than others. That doesn’t mean we’re on the same side on the debate about sex work – as they say, it’s not what happens to you in life that impacts so much as how you deal with what happens to you…
At approx 11 years of age I was a self-identified what was in the mid 1960′s context – queer. I told no-one else this until I was 18 (because of the stigma) and had been away from home for 2 years. After that I was ‘out’ almost everywhere. I had no career that could be lost, nothing to lose in fact, (my immediate family was not judgemental on discovery, I should add) so I was in a good position to do one good thing. Help with increasing the visibility of lesbians. (We have to be seen to be believed..) I didn’t, in the early days, make a conscious decision to be out as an altruistic or political act on behalf of other lesbians – I just couldn’t be stuffed hiding it because I saw it as nothing to be ashamed of. Still, I had to pick my moments, as one does lifelong in some contexts. (The father of the woman who is perceived in her family as having been my partner for the last 11 years, although we actually live together not as partners now, has never been told that his daughter is a lesbian, for example. I must be very careful at Christmastimes!!))
As a consequence of my early self-discovery, I think I’ve always taken the side of stigmatised people. I’ve always asked ‘what, exactly is supposed to be wrong with this person and/or the choices they’ve made?’ Single Mums were stigmatised in my growing up world, for example, and I wanted to know why. (particularly as my mother was one.) Everything seemed to come back to sex. And only women (excepting gay men) got stigmatised.
I honour the tough choices women make to get through, save or build their own lives and/or those of their children. I include sex work in this. Just so you know.
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Sam says:
I’m not clear on what new information or perspective you intended to introduce with the quotes from post 132. However, a linguist’s note on one phrase that stuck out in the two blurbs that don’t mention male demand for prostitution, “In many cases, sex work is often the only viable alternative for women”
First there’s the oxymoron that something described as “only” can be one of several “alternatives”, implying a choice that is really not a choice, a too-common verbal ploy when it comes to prostitution. If your only way of staying alive is by eating the bodies of dead people then you can’t be rightly said to have chosen cannibalism as an alternative.
Then there’s the word “viable” applied to Southeast Asian prostitution:
viable, from the Latin root for “life”
1 : capable of living; especially : having attained such form and development as to be normally capable of surviving outside the mother’s womb eg. a viable fetus
2 : capable of growing or developing eg. viable seeds, viable eggs
3 a : capable of working, functioning, or developing adequately eg. viable alternatives
b : capable of existence and development as an independent unit eg. the colony is now a viable state
c : having a reasonable chance of succeeding a viable candidate
So prostitution, the deadliest ‘work’ of any kind with prostituted women the most murdered women of all women, is here described with a word that means “able to live” and “able to develop normally”. Prostitution in this telling of it is for women to grow as an independent unit with a reasonable chance of succeeding, not the most vulnerably murderful position a woman can be put in.
It’s a racist, sexist lie that prostitution is “viable” for Southeast Asian girls, and it’s a lie spread by wannabe-sexee progressives more concerned with being sexy hipsters than stopping men’s sexual exploitation and violence against women. A feminist political science professor recently told me her she worries for her teen daughter because the whole world tells her she is worth what her body is worth to men (y’know, sexism) and she’s flabbergasted to see that feminists also support girls using sex as a means to gain power. That’s what her daughter and her daughter’s friends are reaching for with the crop tops and daisy dukes, power through sex appeal, and that’s what I was looking for too when I was that age. Feminists are supposed to call out the very foundation of sexism that is the belief that women get power through making themselves sexually available.
Your identification with stigmatized persons I understand. I’ve been a recalcitrant rabblerouser most of my life since learning as a child to distrust authority figures, a healthy skepticism that has served me well.
The minority opinion on prostitution is that women deserve better than pain-filled, shortened lives of indentured sexual servitude to men. The majority opinion is that life’s a bitch and men won’t stop demanding unlimited sexual access to women so don’t waste time trying to educate tricks about the harms to themselves, their families, and prostituted women.
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cicely says:
Hi Sam. I just spent a couple of hours writing a detailed response to your comment which I went to copy (for safety!!) and just after I’d highlighted, my entire screen froze. I couldn’t do anything but shut the computer down and start it up again to write this. Y’all know how I feel.
Deep breaths and some therapeutic housework to music is in order. I will return when I can face it, which may or may not be today. Also, if I disappear altogether for a while, it would be because the computer problem has recurred and I wouldn’t be prepared to risk it a third time if it does. It would be new computer time.
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Sam says:
Bummer. Take the time you need, a whole restful weekend even. I’ve never had a driver’s license so the closest I get to understanding road rage is the aggravation of computer rage.
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Violet says:
Oh, cicely, that is awful. I don’t know how you stand it. You have got to get rid of that Soviet-issue doorstop and get yourself a proper computer. I’m hoping that’s on your Christmas list.
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cicely says:
Thanks for your condolences, Sam and Violet. I must box on with this antiquated equipment for a little while yet. I keep finding new ways to get around its idiosyncrasies, but every now and then – ‘wham’! So if I disappear at some odd juncture you’ll know why. But unless I’ve actually expired, I’ll be back! Oh, I shouldn’t write that as there could be some other unimagined explanation too…oh, well, you know what I’m saying.
Hey Sam, I didn’t learn to drive until I was forty (12 years ago.) This was a good thing since my big drinking days were behind me by then and the bulk of those took place in the years when people thought nothing of spending whole afternoons and evenings imbibing and then driving home. Imagine what a birds eye view of the roads would have looked like! It’s inconceivable on a grand scale now.
Ok, so back to the subject at hand….
I’m not clear on what new information or perspective you intended to introduce with the quotes from post 132.
One thing is a (not unexpected) explanation, from currently working sex workers themselves, as to why, despite most of them saying they want to leave the industry if they could, they don’t.
The economics and the flexibilty outweigh the alienation, the risks, the stigma – in short – everything else, when it comes time to choose, (i.e excercise agency) for those who feel they have a choice at all.(If anti-prostitution feminists and others can’t address these things immediately, they can’t actually help. Wanting help getting out *means* wanting help with these issues in many if not most cases. Or help with overcoming drug addiction, which should happen entirely in the health sphere, not the criminal one, imo.) For, let’s say 40% and thus still millions of prostitutes around the world (being *very* generous and going by the Swedish result as if it were correct and permanent) this would undoubtedly remain the case if the Swedish approach were to be universally applied. Plus the work would be even more underground and dangerous for them as they go to whatever lengths necessary to protect their income by protecting the identity of their customers.Another thing is that, if you look at the legalisation of brothels in The Netherlands issue, you can see reasons why a significant percentage of prostitutes may be opposed or indifferent to legalisation. They probably don’t see it as solving any of their underlying problems (for those who want to leave the occupation, which isn’t everyone) while not improving their working situation at all but actually making it worse. I doubt very much that many, if any working prostitutes would be actively opposed to legalisation purely on the grounds that the work they do should in no way be legitimised or recognised as labour. What else is it but ‘going to work’ when you’ve sent the kids off to school with their lunches, got dressed and headed off out the door to earn an income?
Sex workers do sexual labour, as opposed to mental or manual labour. The part of their bodies that’s central to their work is their genitals. How society *feels* about what people – particularly women – do with their genitals is the source of the stigma and, I suggest, a not insignificant portion of the alienation experienced by people actually doing the work. (And we could discuss and compare elsewhere the different experiences of alienation in other types of work.)
Despite what you’ve written about the German situation, Sam, the fact is that you cannot go to any sex worker advocacy site and not see stigmatisation as a *major* concern for sex workers.
I had more to say in terms of a kind of conclusion to this comment but I’ve forgotten what it was, and as I’m now being requested to go off and do something else, I’ll have to leave it here for now.
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Pony says:
Violet, I had to lift all this out of here so I could read it, you know the five character wide posts. It’s 115 pages in a word document.
When will I get time to read this, but I’ve got to. It’s wonderful to see Sam rock.
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Pony says:
Cicely without knowing anything about your system, I’d suggest you defrag now and once a month, clear your cache daily, history and cookies ditto, get rid of applications you don’t use (in control panel, add/remove programs), make sure you have your system set to download regular updates of Windows and your virus protection, run a complete Spy Bot and AdaWare once a week. Then download Firefox, get IE off your system, and set your security and privacy to high. That should help box no matter how old, whether you’re running ADSL or dial-up.
Also, never have more than two windows open if you have an old system.
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Tom Nolan says:
Cicely:This was a good thing since my big drinking days were behind me by then and the bulk of those took place in the years when people thought nothing of spending whole afternoons and evenings imbibing and then driving home. Imagine what a birds eye view of the roads would have looked like!
When I was growing up in WA it was normal for men like my stepfather to measure distances according to the amount they would drink on the way to their destination. “How far is it to Three Springs?” “Oh, about three and half stubbies”.
I’m still reading this thread, and I suspect a lot of other people are too. Keep it up.
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cicely says:
Thanks muchly for your advice, Pony. I’ll show it to someone who understands it all at the first opportunity. I’ve found a computer troubleshooter who charges $60.00 an hour and my plan is to call him in the first few weeks after Xmas. This is a lean earning time for me in my currently hand to mouth situation so I try not to spend unless I absolutely have to.
I plan to keep going, Tom. I want to see where all the questions we can and should ask about this issue will take us, and I mean this in terms of actual, lived lives as much as in terms of theory and vision. I was amazed to see on the Oz tv news last night that England had held a minute of silence as – and I quote – ‘a mark of respect’ for the 5 recently murdered – quote again – ‘sex workers’. It’s not often you see the word ‘respect’ applied to sex workers in any context. The film clip of the moment was two football teams on the field in their pre-match line-up, with the crowd in the background. It seems the murders have prompted discussion about the legal status of prostitutes in England and the risks they’re exposed to as a result. It was only last year (this year?) that English prostitutes were granted the right to operate in groups of three from a single property, with the specific purpose of increasing their safety.
Another tv first last night – pre midnight even – was an ad, using the actual article, though on a finger, for ‘the thinnest condom ever made….’
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Sam says:
“The economics and the flexibilty outweigh the alienation, the risks, the stigma
Flexibility is not what the quotes you provided reveal. Lack of choice is the dominant theme, like the prostituted women in Ipswich still looking for tricks despite the threat of being murdered. All over the world prostituted people say they want out but they lack the option of leaving their pimps, their kids, their addictions, their poverty because staying alive makes the “choice” for them since dying is not a viable alternative.
“Wanting help getting out means wanting help with these issues”
Legalization and decriminalization as in Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, Greece, Costa Rica, New Zealand etc. has given governments and businesses anti-incentives to helping women get out of The Life. The more trick money waving then the more hoes needed, and the more hoes the more money for pimps, governments, and government-pimps. Cologne fills tax gap with levy on prostitutes
Prostitution exit programs have never materialized in legalized or decriminalized countries. Why would they when the money’s a-flowing to the tune of billions of dollars and the insides of young women’s vaginas, anuses, and mouths are being mined like a limitless natural resource, fountains of GNP growth?
”Plus the work would be even more underground and dangerous for them”
Surely you mean tricking men are more dangerous to prostitutes, right? “The work” is not dangerous, men are. There is no evidence formerly nonviolent tricks suddenly became violent when the Swedish model was introduced. What motivation can you posit for why a nonviolent trick would suddenly bash a prostituted woman’s face in after the passing of the Swedish law? One might suppose tricks would be grateful for any source of the increasingly difficult to find “service”, if one ascribes non-misogynist motivations to tricks like you do.
”Another thing is that, if you look at the legalisation of brothels in The Netherlands issue, you can see reasons why a significant percentage of prostitutes may be opposed or indifferent to legalisation. They probably…”
I’ve got to stop you at that because there’s no place for probablies here. Prostituted women have been asked about legalization and they overwhelmingly reject it. You can’t make a hypothetical out of something that already exists in reality. You don’t need to make guesses about what prostituted women “probably” think, you need to listen to what they’re saying. No ‘probably’ about it, they want out of prostitution because they are not choosing it but succumbing to survival tactics in a man’s world.
”I doubt very much that many, if any working prostitutes would be actively opposed to legalisation purely on the grounds that the work they do should in no way be legitimised or recognised as labour.”
Believe it, baby. A complete 100% of prostituted women, Jenna Jameson included, do not want someone they love to do what they have to do in prostitution. I could easily forward you a dozen articles with women saying variations of “This isn’t a job, it’s survival” or “No one wants to do this but what else is there to do?” or “None of us wants to be here but there’s no place to go.” In a brief blog debate between Katha Pollitt and Audacia Ray, pornstitution promoter Audacia admitted that prostitution is not a job in that girls should be taught trick-pleasing techniques in school and given internships as handjob-givers in massage parlors to learn the trade as other apprentices would.
What else is it but ‘going to work’ when you’ve sent the kids off to school with their lunches, got dressed and headed off out the door to earn an income?
What else is it? It’s cicely’s flight from reality, that’s what it is.
”The part of their bodies that’s central to their work is their genitals. How society feels about what people – particularly women – do with their genitals is the source of the stigma”
I think you’re wrong that prostitutes are used for their genitals. Men using strippers, phone sex workers, peep shows, and pornography aren’t using prostituted women’s genitals. What they are “using” is the inferiority of all things feminine to make themselves feel like bigger men. Eminem, Howard Stern, Andrew Dice Clay, Adam Corolla and the rest of the frat pack didn’t get rich and become male heroes by giving genital-rubbing satisfaction to men, they got rich selling men’s belief in their superiority to bitches and hoes. Fucking women that way feels better to men than genital fucking, which is why shaming women as whores, hoes, sluts, slags, etc. would appear counterproductive to men getting laid frequently but they are very productive in the superiority-stroking department.
It’s about maintaining the existing patriarchal social order that puts men on top and keeps women on bottom. You can say homophobia is simply about the way society feels about how gays and lesbians use their genitals, and when people misunderstand homophobia they say “But it’s just sex.” People who say that are missing how gender roles determine who gets the power to rule and who gets “empowered” to serve the rulers, and in those terms the opposition to homosexuality makes more sense. Pornstitution isn’t centrally about rubbed gentitals feeling good, it’s about reminding women of their subservient status and reinforcing men’s “right” to make demands on the sexual servant class that is women.
you cannot go to any sex worker advocacy site
“Jo says so” is irrelevant. The Internet is not where prostituted women live and it’s not where they die. Trafficking victims and dead prostitutes don’t have websites and blogs. The 1.8 million children UNICEF estimates have been forced into prostitution globally do not maintain pro-sex work Myspace pages.
A young woman with my name, Samantha Berg, was 19 and known to have been in prostitution for several years before she was murdered and her frozen body found dumped in an industrial parking lot in January 2004. She never had a website like I have a website, and she also never had a 21st birthday like I did or traveled the world like I have. She’s a Samantha Berg who never got the chance to get into a blog debate.
One thing Samantha Berg and I have in common is that sexee feminists wish we’d both disappear quietly so they can go about the sexy business of getting sexy book deals, sexy speaking engagements and profiting from pornstitution industries through their sexy blogs and magazines. Bust Magazine had Gretchen Moll on the cover and an interview with her about portraying Bettie Page inside. The real Bettie Page is an incest victim turned sex object turned religious nut, but the pheminists at Bust have no use for the real woman who is Bettie Page, just her objectified sexuality they pin to their blouses on the way to the NOW conference. Imagine a feminist magazine cover and interview with Kirstie Alley for playing the Gloria Steinem role in “A Bunny’s Tale” instead of a cover and interview with Gloria Steinem herself.
Just as the real woman Bettie Page is inconsequential to Bust’s editors because fuckme feminism has no place for such downers as actual sex industry survivors, so too does the likelihood of seeing a Bust cover and interview with Traci Lords stand the same chance as a snowball in hell. Despite the celebrity starfucking mission of Bust, no matter how many movies she makes, albums she records, books she writes or feminist organizations like Children of the Night she supports, child pornstitution survivor Traci Lords is not feminist magazine cover material because she speaks against the abusive pornstitution industries and the girls it chews up from the inside out. Maybe some sexee woman director will fictionalize her rapes in a movie called “The Notorious Traci Lords” and feminists will squeal in delight over how much they looove Traci and how empowerful pictures of her bent over another woman’s lap and getting paddled like a naughty child are.
Maybe there will be a replay of what happened to Linda Boreman, another pornstitution survivor sexee feminists can’t look in the eye, and after Traci’s death there will be a documentary released to mainstream theaters called “Inside Traci’s Deep Throat” where the men who profited from her recorded rapes will find new revenue streams for vintage rapes while feminists are cowed into silence lest they be deemed the horrid, humorless, unfun kind of feminist.
The hours it took me to write all that I’ve written on this thread was taken because it is time another Samantha Berg never got. It’s time denied to other Samantha Bergs whose lives are proof that men cannot have their whores and not rape them to death so they shouldn’t be allowed to have whores at all. If and when men can prove they can handle prostitutes with non-homicidal care I might reconsider my stance. So far as I’m concerned the ball is in men’s court to prove why they should be allowed to keep using prostitutes and sexee feminists are playing for the wrong team.
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Pony says:
Cicely. What I suggested you do doesn’t require the services of a $60 an hour tech. Really, it’s no more difficult than keeping a sewing machine tuned up, or calibrating diving equipment.
If you do prefer to get someone else to do it could you hire a woman tech? Here, computer tech is one of the favoured subsidized training programs offered women who want out of prostitution. I imagine if you called your local computer training college, or unemployment insurance centre, or similar, they could give you names of graduates prepared to take on clients.
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cicely says:
Flexibility is not what the quotes you provided reveal. Lack of choice is the dominant theme…
Did we read the same article, Sam?
…the ILO surveys point out that many workers entered for pragmatic reasons and with a general sense of awareness of the choice they were making. About one-half of Malaysian prostitutes interviewed for the study said it was “friends who showed the way to earn money easily,” a pattern that is replicated in the other study countries…
…Sex work is usually better paid than most of the options available to young, often uneducated women, in spite of the stigma and danger attached to the work. In all four of the countries studied, sex work provided significantly higher earnings than other forms of unskilled labour…
… For single mothers with children, it is often a more flexible, remunerative and less time-consuming option than factory or service work…
…A survey among workers in massage parlours and brothels in Thailand revealed that “most of the women entered the sex industry for economic reasons.” Brothel workers were more likely to say that they became prostitutes to earn money to support their children, while massage parlour women were often motivated by the opportunity to earn a high income to support their parents. Almost all of those surveyed stated that they knew the type of work they would be doing before taking up the job. Almost one-half of the brothel workers and one-quarter of the massage parlour workers had previously worked in agriculture. A further 17 per cent of the masseuses said they had previously worked in home or cottage industries and 11 per cent had been domestic servants…
I see a number of other choices and options mentioned here – in between sex work and death.
I’m not persuaded that exit strategies aren’t available through sex worker advocacy and or help centres. I’m sure I saw something about that in an article about a german sex worker support centre (which I will try to find again). I definitely feel strongly that they should be available. The New Zealand Government approach of decriminalisation is intended to be a harm reduction model rather than an open endorsement of prostitution as an occupation, (where-as I see a place for actual endorsement of sex work that is wholly voluntary and not only motivated by economic hardship or to finance drug addiction…) so I would hope and expect to see something happening on that front.
I didn’t say that prostitutes ‘are used for their genitals’. I said that the part of their bodies that’s central to their work (and this is what sets them apart from manual or mental labourers) is their genitals. (I’m talking mainly about prostitutes specifically.) It’s not quite the same thing.
I can assure you that my vision of a healthy sex industry is not motivated by any desire to sustain a patriarchal social order. I think it’s possible for women to do sex work and not be in a subordinate position at all. I think there are certainly women who achieve this even now. I don’t believe that every (heterosexual) commercial sexual exchange that takes place is necassarily an example of male domination over ‘a’ woman much less ‘all’ women. The sooner more men understand this too, the closer we’ll be to where I’d like to see us go. I do know that prohibition (whichever party is criminalised) won’t get us there. It will, along with maintaining or increasing the danger, maintain the stigma that attaches to sex work and that is frequently mentioned as being hugely problematic in many more places than just Jo’s website.
You are right that it’s the dangerous *men* who make the work dangerous, no question. But when prostitutes are sitting targets in places as secret as they can possibly be – to protect *the men* from detection and possible prosecution, as per the Swedish situation, the dangerous ones have better opportunity and freedom to act.
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Sam says:
Just as you don’t see the power of pimps despite an estimated 90% of prostitutes in the United States having pimps, so too do you not see the coercive power of money offered to women who prostitute versus money offered to women doing agricultural or factory work.
Men offer “young, uneducated women” with few employment options the choice of $3 a day for factory work or $30 a day for prostitution. Poverty-stricken young, uneducated women trying to keep their kids and parents alive by making the rational choice to go with the job that pays 10 times what other jobs pay are exploited to mask tricking men’s rampant violence. Men shell out lots of cash to perpetrate rapes, beatings, disease spreading, burnings, slashings, strangulations, and murder against the semen spitoons slaves they’ve rented.
What does a zero added to the end of your yearly salary look like? Enough to risk repeated rapes, beatings, diseases, burnings, slashings, strangulations, and murder by men to keep your kids fed or your mother on her medicine? Desperate young women make bitter lemonade out of rape-flavored lemons and you shout, “Aha! Sex workers by free choice! See, it’s just a job.”
You’re so eager to avoid men’s responsibility for prostituted slavery and violence that you think you can cherry pick out all the children in SE Asian prostitution and all the trafficking victims to produce a whittled-down group of Southeast Asian sex workers used to avoid discussing men and their violence against women. It is men who choose to offer 10 times more for use of a whore than what they’ll pay for anything else a young, uneducated SE Asian woman might do. Pimping and tricking men choosing which young, uneducated SE Asian women responsible for their family’s welfare they’ll magnanimously offer to “let” become whores is where the real choice in prostitution lies.
It is said prostitution is a choice between two consenting adults, but it is less said that those two consenting adults are the pimp and the trick. There’s a Playboy cartoon with two men undressing and a woman with a stunned look on her face captioned, “I’m game and Jim’s all right with it, so that makes two consenting adults.” I once came very close to being gang raped when one man made a face to the other man intimating, ‘we could rape her, wanna?’ A slight horizontal nod from him is what stopped there from being two consenting adults coordinating my rape, and I wasn’t prostituting.
In the USA a study by the Council for Prostitution Alternatives found prostituted women are raped an average 33 times a year. It’s pretty clear that you, like the ILO, don’t see those rapes as real rapes against real women perpetrated by real rapists. No one who fully grasped the horrific magnitude of how often prostituted women are sexually assaulted could try to explain those 33 rapes a year away with “they knew the type of work they would be doing.”
So what? Men raping prostitutes routinely is all right because the women were aware sexual violence goes along with prostitution? When does the problem of men’s raping behavior take center stage to explaining why some small group of poor, young, uneducated women in SE Asian brothels who aren’t child victims and aren’t trafficking victims accept the sexual violence they get from men? The treatment of women in SE Asia leaves a lot to be desired for women who aren’t prostitutes (remember wifely legitimacy and the extra violence it allows husbands?)
The amazing you can extrapolate from this misogynist, impoverished situation that men should have the right to pay for sex as a means of helping women because money is the highest good, more important than not getting raped weekly according to you. The trade off of women suffering weekly rapes and other brutalizations by anonymous men in exchange for life-sustaining money is unacceptable to me.
I’m sure I saw something about that in an article about a german sex worker support centre (which I will try to find again).
Please do try to find it. Paraphrasing a woman whose opinion on prostitution I highly respect, a bowl of free condoms next to the free coffee machine does not a prostitution support center make.
I think it’s possible for women to do sex work and not be in a subordinate position at all.
Can you give some examples of men who use prostitutes without those men being in a dominant position? There are many versions of the saying “He who pays the piper picks the tune”.
I’ll leave here with some information about men’s attitudes towards prostitutes since you defend men’s rights to use prostitutes with the vigor of a libertarian defending the rights of both wealthy and poor people to sleep under bridges.
Quote from tricking men:
“She gives up the right to say ‘no’. I own her that time.”
“Guys get off on controlling women. It is paid rape.”
“You’re making them subservient. And there’s the sham of enjoyment.”
“I think about getting even.”
“Prostitution takes away a part of themselves they can’t get back.”
“Sometimes I feel it’s wrong but I try to block that out.”
Some statistics:
75% of tricks disagree “There is nothing wrong with prostitution.”
79% of tricks disagree “If I were thinking about getting married, I wouldn’t mind marrying a prostitute.”
66% disagree “Most prostitutes make a lot of money.”
69% disagreed “It would be okay if my son went to prostitutes.”
95% disagreed “It would be okay if my daughter grew up to be a prostitute.”
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Sam says:
You are right that it’s the dangerous men who make the work dangerous, no question. But when prostitutes are sitting targets in places as secret as they can possibly be
Please stop telling this lie, cicely. I can think of no other way to say that to you than to just say it. You have offered no proof, no testimony from working Swedish sex workers, that prostituted women in Sweden are suffering worse as a result of the 1999 law.
To the contrary, an estimated 60% of Sweden’s prostitutes have taken advantage of counseling, addiction and job skills enhancement services to leave prostitution. Recorded phone conversations with known traffickers show the Swedish model deters them from doing business as usual in Sweden, and prostituted women are turning in abusive men with long criminal histories so police can deal with them as violent criminals and sexual predators should be dealt with.
There is no evidence of the supposedly superduper top secret underground dens of prostitution Joe Blow Businessman and his merry band of Happy Hour Cohorts can find but police, NGO workers and feminists can’t. Please stop telling that lie or prove there’s some merit to it, because just repeating unsubstantiated bullshit doesn’t elevate it to truth.
the dangerous ones have better opportunity and freedom to act.
Compared to what? From Edmonton, Canada to Atlantic City, USA to Ipswich, UK dangerous tricks are serially killing women found on public streets and dumping their bodies in public. No superduper top secret prostitution den required. No attempts to hide the bodies even, just leaving them naked, dead, and dumped in parking lots and dirty streams.
A woman alone and naked with a man pumped up on his sense of ownership over her body is as vulnerable a place as a woman can be whether it’s in his car, a motel room, a secluded alley, or a superduper top secret prostitution den.
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Mandos says:
Men offer “young, uneducated women” with few employment options the choice of $3 a day for factory work or $30 a day for prostitution. Poverty-stricken young, uneducated women trying to keep their kids and parents alive by making the rational choice to go with the job that pays 10 times what other jobs pay are exploited to mask tricking men’s rampant violence. Men shell out lots of cash to perpetrate rapes, beatings, disease spreading, burnings, slashings, strangulations, and murder against the semen spitoons slaves they’ve rented.
What does a zero added to the end of your yearly salary look like? Enough to risk repeated rapes, beatings, diseases, burnings, slashings, strangulations, and murder by men to keep your kids fed or your mother on her medicine? Desperate young women make bitter lemonade out of rape-flavored lemons and you shout, “Aha! Sex workers by free choice! See, it’s just a job.”
Quick question. Let’s say we end prostitution today.
*streamers, kazoos, party favours, cheesecake*
Do you foresee the $3 a day factory jobs becoming more lucrative?
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cicely says:
I once came very close to being gang raped when one man made a face to the other man intimating, ‘we could rape her, wanna?’ A slight horizontal nod from him is what stopped there from being two consenting adults coordinating my rape, and I wasn’t prostituting.
In my hard drinking, wild, directionless and sometimes homeless youth (between the ages of 16 and 21)- and even on a couple of occasions beyond that time – I had more close shaves than I can even remember. And I do mean close. The fact that I never *actually* got raped, i.e. fully penetrated with a penis or other object, made it difficult for me to believe the relatively early (in my feminist awareness) quoted figure that one in four women had been raped by the time they’d reached adulthood. I felt I’d been in many more dangerous positions with men than the average woman, and not been, so how could this be true? Close for one example was being invited home with two male acquaintances, where they drugged my drinks while we were watching an episode of ‘Kung Fu’(that dates me). I went to the bathroom, fell over, and couldn’t get up again. I heard one of the men come in, then he called out to his mate ‘I think she’s ready now.’ They carried me into their kitchen, laid me on the table and removed my jeans and panties, talking all the while about what they were going to do to me. As it happened, all they wanted to do was scare me, which they did, and after about half an hour or an hour they left me and went into another room and I got up, got dressed and left (screaming abuse and threats about getting them busted for the drugs in their house, I might add). I could spend the whole morning, if not the whole day, writing of other examples. If we used some definitions of rape, eg the one used in the most famous survey, I have been sexually intimidated, abused *and* raped many, many times over. As I say, without fear of contradiction, more times than I can remember. And I know there is barely a woman alive who has not experienced sexual assault of some description.
I do not excuse or defend male intimidation or violence against women as any part of my arguement for decriminalisation of prostitution. I feel like repeating that one thousand times.
Often, the experience of prostitution *is* those things, I don’t dispute that, but not always, either now or forever.
I admit it is difficult to argue for the creation of a healthy, non-abusive sex industry under current circumstances, but I don’t find it impossible, and I do find it worth arguing for. Obviously.
Please stop telling this lie, cicely. I can think of no other way to say that to you than to just say it. You have offered no proof, no testimony from working Swedish sex workers, that prostituted women in Sweden are suffering worse as a result of the 1999 law.
I don’t think this is true. I believe I have quoted a Swedish prostitute here, and also a Norwegian prostitute about the impact of the Swedish law, and, if I recall correctly, on one of those occasions you dismissed the testimony out of hand. This to-ing and fro-ing with evidence, testimony and statistics etc gets very tiresome. It’s like interpretations of the bible. You can have the text support any arguement you care to make if you use it selectively.
Part of my arguement is that even *if* the Swedish approach could be more successful than decriminalisation in dealing with sex industry abuses around the world (and I’m not convinced that it would be) it exists for the wrong reasons. I don’t accept the rationale, or the illiberal and repressive politics behind it and believe that ultimately, if it were to spread, it would do more harm than good in terms of societies view of sexuality.
I haven’t addressed everything in your comments, but work beckons for now…
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cicely says:
Some statistics:
75% of tricks disagree “There is nothing wrong with prostitution.”
79% of tricks disagree “If I were thinking about getting married, I wouldn’t mind marrying a prostitute.”
66% disagree “Most prostitutes make a lot of money.”
69% disagreed “It would be okay if my son went to prostitutes.”
95% disagreed “It would be okay if my daughter grew up to be a prostitute.”
Who was doing the asking? Four out of these five statistics would disappear with the disappearance of the stigma. Men have notoriously transparent double standards when it comes to their own and women’s sexuality, so no surprises here. They’re also so notoriously dishonest about their sexual behaviour, as a group, that accurate statistics can’t be obtained about their sexual activities, particularly where paying for sexual services is concerned. Self reporting statistics placed alongside the customer statistics of prostitutes don’t add up by some hummungous degree.
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cicely says:
Here is a succinct overview of the situation re approaches to prostitution in Europe. (Dated, but still post the Swedish law reform.) Sam, you’ll note mention of exit strategies (in Germany in the form of training for alternative employment.) I couldn’t find the original source of the particular support centre I mentioned, which wasn’t surprising. I do so many searches and far from everything gets saved to favourites. You’ll also note mention of the moving underground of some – who knows how many – sex workers in both Holland and Germany. Neither of us can ‘prove’ anything on this score, in terms of statistics. The point is, these workers don’t want to be found, either by authorities or by people who want to help them get out of the industry, whether they want to be so helped or not.
Prostitution Policy in Europe: A Time of Change?
Judith Kilvington , Sophie Day , Helen Ward
Abstract:
There has been considerable recent debate about prostitution in Europe that reflects concerns about health, employment and human rights. Legal changes are being introduced in many countries. We focus on two examples in order to discuss the likely implications. A new law in The Netherlands is normalizing aspects of the sex industry through decriminalizing both workers and businesses. In Sweden, on the other hand, prostitution is considered to be a social problem, and a new law criminalizes the purchasers of sexual services in an attempt to reduce demand. Both reforms appear to have had their desired effect at one level; in The Netherlands, health and safety regulations will be introduced as in any other job, and EU sex workers gain full social, legal and employment rights; in Sweden there was initially a tenfold decrease in the numbers of women working visibly on the streets, and some workers have left the industry.However,in both countries, the new legislation has also driven some sex work underground. Many sex workers are excluded by the Dutch system and move underground to become effectively invisible to the authorities. In Sweden sex workers and their clients also become less visible in order that the latter can avoid sanction. Social and economic changes, such as increased migration and the growing use of the Internet will also render the sex industry less visible both to state regulation and to health care workers. The major problems of prostitution for the workers remain exploitation, stigma, abuse and criminalization. These are not unique to the industry, and can only be tackled effectively by the self-organization of sex workers into unions and rights groups, along with full decriminalization. An alternative vision is promised through self-organization and anti-racist actions by sex workers in Germany; normalization and workers’ rights are tackled alongside training programmes for those seeking alternatives. Policy makers throughout Europe would do well to look at their experience and not simply at the clash of legal reforms.
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cicely says:
I meant Holland and Sweden re the moving underground…
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cicely says:
Can you give some examples of men who use prostitutes without those men being in a dominant position? There are many versions of the saying “He who pays the piper picks the tune”.
One thing that immediately springs to mind is that when I’ve talked to women who’ve worked as prostitutes, even aside from but including my close little band of friends, it’s been explained to me that they don’t generally kiss a client or allow a client to kiss them on the mouth. At the first attempt by the client they would just push them away or turn their head away and say ‘no kissing’ – and maybe add -’I’m not your girlfriend’. If they’re not abusers, clearly the clients comply. That was the case in the examples I’m talking about. Obviously there’s plenty I don’t know about the general nature of how activities are negotiated, but that’s one thing I first heard many years ago, and heard more than once or twice. So, kissing can be experienced as a more personal and intimate act than fucking. That actually makes sense to me.
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Sam says:
Do you foresee the $3 a day factory jobs becoming more lucrative?
Will stopping prostitution end all poverty? No. There’s no reason to expect it to.
Stopping prostitution as much as possible means stopping the systematized rapes of 35-40 million people, mostly girls and women from the global south. Whatever else a 13-year-old in Thailand may have to do for money, it won’t be getting raped 10-20 times a day by men who travel from around the world for childraping privileges. If factory work or microcredit loans or cooperative businesses or whatever else boys and men do for money becomes what girls and women do, at least the organized rapes, trafficking and pimping will not be perforating female bodies and minds anymore. Not being the sex class hasn’t erased all problems for males, but it has certainly helped them achieve that whole world dominance thing they’ve got going on.
”I do not excuse or defend male intimidation or violence against women as any part of my arguement for decriminalisation of prostitution.”
You’re not doing anything to stop it by defending men’s entitlement to sex on demand. Supporting men’s right to economically coerce sex from women supports the rape culture and does nothing to dismantle it.
I know you don’t see it this way, but considering prostitution as an inevitable fact of poverty-stricken women’s lives serves to excuse male sexual violence by turning it into a natural force that can only be dealt with after the fact, like a hurricane or snowstorm. Pro-johners/decriminalizers have got no plan on how to stop men from raping, only plans on how to patch women up after they’ve been raped. Healthcare for hookers does not stop men from raping them an average 33 times a year.
One angry girl told me of a prostituted woman grabbed off the street by a rapist who didn’t know she was a prostitute. When she told him he didn’t have to use violence because she was a prostitute and would go along with whatever he wanted, the man went into a rage and redoubled his punching. You’ve convinced yourself men like this are an anomaly. I know they’re not.
You can have the text support any arguement you care to make if you use it selectively.
Is that so? All right then, since anyone can find statistical evidence to support their claims, provide one study showing a majority of prostituted women want to stay in prostitution.
Just one.
You can use the text as selectively as you like, but you have to provide a starting point text first.
Who was doing the asking?
What was that again about you not excusing male violence against prostituted women?
Men prove in word and deed in every way possible that they hate women generally and prostituted women particularly enough to rape and murder them in numbers unparalleled to other groups of women. You’re so hung up on defending these Nice Guys right to the whores they love to hate that you can’t see tricks as the violent sexual predators most are. You’re soaking in a culture of male hatred of women and still cling like a woman on a rape trial jury to the idea that there’s probably just something wrong with this individual relaying of the facts of men’s negative attitudes about prostitutes and prostitution.
Something must be amiss is the telling because no way can you believe tricking men understand prostitution is paid rape, a form of revenge against women, guys getting off on controlling women, removal of a woman’s right to say no, or taking away a part of themselves they can’t get back. “Pish posh,” you say, “obviously the research is flawed because no way are tricking men violent, misogynist fucks the surfeit of raped and murdered prostitutes might lead people to conclude they are.”
Going back to your preferred postmodernist plastic view on statistics being able to be twisted every which way to prove anything, you should have no problem providing just one text of collected trick opinions and quotes that refutes what I’ve presented. If it’s true that anyone can bend a text to their will this should be easy for you to accomplish.
”you’ll note mention of exit strategies (in Germany in the form of training for alternative employment.)
I’ve noted mention of them many times. What I can’t note, because I haven’t seen it yet, is the physical realization of such places that seem to only exist on paper.
”I couldn’t find the original source of the particular support centre I mentioned”
You’re telling us that in a country on top of traffickers’ profit lists and with an estimated 400,000 sex workers that you, with all the resources at your disposal, can’t find the name of one German prostitution exit program. If you can’t find one exit program, what chance do trafficking victims, underaged girls, drug addicts, and women battered by pimps throughout Germany have of finding any?
Can you give some examples of men who use prostitutes without those men being in a dominant position?
“they don’t generally kiss a client or allow a client to kiss them on the mouth.”
Because “Pretty Woman” is basically a documentary of prostitutes’ lives.
The men may use their greater size, money and social standing to control prostituted women’s cunts, assholes, tits, and mouths when it comes to cock contact, but your friends refusing mouth-on-mouth touching is totally proof of prostituted women’s dominance over tricks and proof that women control the act of prostitution.
So your answer is ‘No”, you can’t give an example of men using prostitutes without being in a dominant position.
Prostituted women do incredible mental gymnastics to separate themselves from whores. One stripper says, “I let men call me bitch and whore but I don’t let them finger me during private dances”, another says, “I let men finger me during dances but I don’t let them call me bitch and whore” and each one really thinks she’s not the trashy ho the other one is. Men think they’re both trashy hoes, and since they’re both seeking men’s money it’s the men who make the rules they have to obey or no money for them.
When I was young I was an “everything but” girl having non-penis-in-vagina penetrative threesomes with boys and calling myself a virgin because according to patriarchy’s terms I was technically a virgin and I needed to hold on to that so I didn’t feel like a slut. Boys and men still thought I was a slut and treated me as one. You can also see this “technical non-slut” trap at play when strippers who don’t want to consider themselves strippers get on stages dressed like strippers in corsets in fishnets and doing every movement a stripper does but with two square inches of nipple flesh covered so they’re not strippers but burlesque performers. She can dress like a stripper, perform like a stripper, and pose like a stripper but so long as the patriarchal mandate of covered nipples is technically adhered to with pasties women can tell themselves it’s burlesquey performance art and not just plain old stripping with covered nipples.
Folks, there are no threesome-having technical virgins and there are no corset-waisted, fishnet-wearing, thonged-ass but pasty-covered non-stripper performance artistes. In the same vein, hookers not kissing tricks is not evidence of the ability of prostituted women to set the boundaries tricks will respect just like setting any other arbitrary line like no namecalling or no fingering does not un-whore strippers in the eyes of men. These are all ways for women to internally lessen the painful cognitive dissonance that comes from knowing men demand and reward women who act like fuck-hungry whores at the same time men hate women and punish women who act like fuck-hungry whores.
You think men making whores out of women has nothing to do with their hatred of women and I think it has everything to do with it.
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cicely says:
… If factory work or microcredit loans or cooperative businesses or whatever else boys and men do for money becomes what girls and women do…
If more feminists spent more time and energy in these areas than they do fighting with the large numbers of women who actively – even if reluctantly (because *no* available choice is a good one) *choose* sex work over other employment options, and want that work recognised, dignified and the conditions in it improved while they’re doing it, this might happen a whole lot faster. You can’t reduce the numbers of poor women opting to do sex work without first offering them better alternatives. And when you can’t honour the decisions they themselves have made about living their own daily lives – now, (it isn’t a rehearsal) but would rather, if possible, force them to accept options they’ve already rejected, it must be difficult for them to see you as any kind of ally. Many feminist anti-prostitution activists, it seems to me, have got the cart before the horse. So much so that I could almost be persuaded that the stated end goal of improving the lives of women is less important to them than the imposition of rules around sexual behaviour that enshrine their particular beliefs about it. (Ok, admittedly because they believe this will ultimately improve the lives of women…) I’d be less inclined to be persuaded of this if it wasn’t also the case that those same activists are opposed to prostitution under any circumstances, i.e. whether the other choice for the woman is working in a factory or a rice paddy for two dollars a day, six or seven days a week, or working in a bank or a hair salon for some reasonable living wage, for five days a week.
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cicely says:
You’re not doing anything to stop it by defending men’s entitlement to sex on demand. Supporting men’s right to economically coerce sex from women supports the rape culture and does nothing to dismantle it.
In political terms, Sam, where would you place the real life phenomenon of white middle class English and American women (probably women from other countries as well) travelling to Haiti where they choose holiday lovers from the impoverished young male population, and lavish them with gifts and money? There’s a movie soon to be in theatres here called ‘Heading South’, starring Charlotte Rampling, about this practice. It’s sexual tourism undertaken by women. Have you ever read Jean Rhys’s novel ‘Good morning, midnight’? The main character, Sasha, is very familiar with the ways of Europe’s gigolos. I suspect that if the demand from women for the purchase of sexual services from men was as great as the reverse, and women felt ok about acting on their sexual desires in this way, men would much more often consider the work than they currently do. It’s difficult to get an accurate picture of these things when women’s sexuality, women’s desire and women’s bodies are the sites of societies collective morality and shame around sex. I argue, as I always do, that it’s the fact that it’s sex that makes sex work the lightening rod it is, as compared to other forms of exploitative labour. I think the stigma around it is irrational, and I’d even go so far as to say that our attitudes towards female sexuality contribute not insignificantly to the trauma of actual rape victims. A woman should be able to say ‘The bastard raped me’, to anyone at all, (and I certainly would) in the same way she would be able say ‘The bastard hit me in the face’. He did the wrong thing. She didn’t. She shouldn’t have to be traumatised about it to the extent that she wonders what her own contribution was, for the rest of her bloody life!
All right then, since anyone can find statistical evidence to support their claims, provide one study showing a majority of prostituted women want to stay in prostitution.
You show me one that shows a majority of factory workers want to stay in factory work and want their children to get into it too. In fact, any one of the occupations sex workers have rejected will do.
cicely: Who was doing the asking?
Sam: What was that again about you not excusing male violence against prostituted women?
I was just making the point that men ( or people generally) talking about sex will say what they’re expected to say, by the person asking. If it’s another man, the answer might be different. For example, your statistics included one that noted 69% of the ‘tricks’ said it would not be ok if their son went to prostitutes. Have you heard of the phenomenon of fathers introducing their sons to sex via prostitutes? I would imagine men who actually go to prostitutes themselves would be much more likely to adopt this practice than men who don’t. And yet. I don’t trust this statistic, funnily enough.
Men prove in word and deed in every way possible that they hate women generally and prostituted women particularly enough to rape and murder them in numbers unparalleled to other groups of women.
Opportunity and stigma. Both of which the whole of society is responsible for. No-one has attempted to answer my earlier question ‘How *doesn’t* keeping sex workers out on a limb, powerless and stigmatised targets for the rest of society – its opinions and its violences – feed as much into patriarchal ideas about women and sexuality as anti-pornography and anti-prostitution feminists say the very existence of these occupations do? Wanna give it a go?
I have to say, Sam – and perhaps I’m repeating myself – that the language you yourself use when you talk about sex work makes its own contribution to the shaming of sex workers. I know you’re not going to desist, because you always couple it with the language of clearly misogynist men, and you believe you’re performing the service of letting women know what those men (or *all* men?) really think.
Misogyny exists, and widely. No arguement there. But there is more than one way address it. Maintaining a ‘them and us’ binary based on an idea that women are always subordinate and men are always dominant in any given situation, and wanting to transfer power ‘cleanly’ from one sex to the other, isn’t my idea of the best way to go. I just don’t think it’s that simple.
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Sam says:
If more feminists spent more time and energy in these areas than they do fighting with the large numbers of women who actively want that work recognised
There are not large numbers of women want prostitution legitimized as work. It has been well established you haven’t got one iota of research or other collected information to prove this assertion. If only 100 out of 400,000 sex workers in legalized Germany have joined the union ver.di then it’s hardly fair to call that .00025% a large number.
Despite the great opportunity provided for me to brag about the non-prostitution activism I’ve done and continue to do against poverty, I’m not going to bite the hook laced with red herring. As much as I loved my time as the Manhattan global issues leader for RESULTS in their lobbying to fund microcredit and tuberculosis treatments, it’s neither here not there when it comes to the work I do raising awareness of men’s increased demands for more and younger prostituted bodies to (ab)use sexually and the Swedish model that stems these abuses as no other policy has succeeded doing.
force them to accept options they’ve already rejected, it must be difficult for them to see you as any kind of ally.
Mean feminists like me didn’t force those 60% of Swedish prostitutes into job training, counseling, and drug addiction assistance when they were happy enough being whores. The letters from survivors of prostitution that I get and the women who clamor for my ear after I give public presentations don’t share your mudslung belief that big baddie me is forcing them out of satisfying careers in prostitution. My whole life people have thanked me for having the chutzpah to say what they were thinking but didn’t feel brave enough to say or couldn’t put into words, and that kind of feedback has only increased since I started turning my talents towards men (ab)using prostitutes.
I could almost be persuaded that the stated end goal of improving the lives of women is less important to them than the imposition of rules around sexual behaviour
How perceptive of you to pick up on the anti-sexual freedom fascism in my extensive writings about men not ever having the right to demand sex from women. The use of impersonal pronouns does not effectively distance your accusation that I don’t really care about women from if you had just come out and said, “You don’t really care about women.”
In political terms, Sam, where would you place the real life phenomenon of white middle class English and American women (probably women from other countries as well) travelling to Haiti where they choose holiday lovers from the impoverished young male population
In feminist-political terms I place it next to “But women rape too!” and other ignorable diversions from the much larger problem of confronting epidemic male violence.
You show me one that shows a majority of factory workers want to stay in factory work and want their children to get into it too.
Ah, a trick question that diverts attention from prostitution and the men who control and benefit from it. Remember the good laugh we all had back when you accused anti-pornstitutioners of losing credibility because they don’t know or care about other forms of human trafficking? I’ll bet money I know a lot more about human trafficking for factory, agricultural, and domestic work than any pro-sex work advocate knows. The same organized criminals running bodies for other slave labor run it for sexual slavery as well and looking at the exploiters instead of the exploited reveals simple truths about supply and demand that cut across slavery in all its forms.
If you genuinely respected other victims of trafficking instead of just using them to try and score Swedish model-bashing points then you would not ask for proof slave-wage factory workers want out of their exploitive situations. The fact that organized criminals exploit, not infrequently to the point of slavery, women named Marisol in meatpacking plants does not lessen the harms of women named Maria being sexually exploited in brothels. I’m looking dead ahead at the common denominator of human traffickers and you’re looking at the degrees of difference between traffickees. I find some comfort that you’re no longer comparing prostituted women wanting out of prostitution like everyone wants to win the lottery anymore and have moved on to comparing trafficking/exploitation victims with trafficking/exploitation victims.
I was just making the point that men ( or people generally) talking about sex will say what they’re expected to say, by the person asking.
Sorry but I just can’t accept your hypothesis that all studies ever done about sex are inherently too flawed to be useful. Methodological problems are not new to researchers of human behavior and the caprices of human behavior doesn’t mean all social anthropology is unreliable with nothing of worth to offer.
Men prove in word and deed in every way possible that they hate women generally and prostituted women particularly enough to rape and murder them in numbers unparalleled to other groups of women.
Opportunity and stigma. Both of which the whole of society is responsible for.Fuck no. Don’t you smear women’s hands with the blood men spill. Women don’t share anything close to equal power with men but you’re an eager beaver to accord women half the responsibility for the rapes and murders of prostituted women. Men are responsible for 97% of rapes and 90% of violent crimes, and trying to pin 50% of men’s rampaging femicide on women serves the patriarchal purpose of diminishing the true extent of men’s violence. Only men benefit from covering up the extremely lopsided truth about men and the misogyny they visit on women’s bodies.
How doesn’t keeping sex workers out on a limb, powerless and stigmatised targets for the rest of society – its opinions and its violences – feed as much into patriarchal ideas about women and sexuality as anti-pornography and anti-prostitution feminists say the very existence of these occupations do?
Underlying this question is the nonsense fantasy that legitimization of men’s right to sex on demand gives sex workers power and destigmatizes them. There is no proof this is true and a lot of proof that it’s a false hope. Decriminalized prostitution in British Columbia led to Robert Pickton and the largest body count for a serial killer preying on prostituted women yet. England’s fast legitimization of the pornstitution industries over the past 15 years has brought the fastest whore-killing turnaround in English history with the Ipswich murders. Where men’s right to whores are legitimized, the value of women’s lives goes down, as is the case in Australia where prostitution-legalized provinces are also the worst provinces for wife-battering and child prostitution.
And one more time until it finally sinks in, prostituted women are not “targets for the rest of society” because it is men who target prostitutes for violence and not the vague collection of all “society” targeting prostituted women for violence. Men.
the language you yourself use when you talk about sex work makes its own contribution to the shaming of sex workers.
That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard since Bitch|Lab suggested Ariel Levy using the word “bimbo” contributed to white frat boys raping a black woman stripper at a Duke University party. Behold the mighty power pornstitution-critical feminists hold over men who rape the prostituted women they pay to subjugate!
Anyway, that’s not what survivors of prostitution say to me, that what I write makes them feel ashamed. They say it’s the verbal abuse by tricking men and what those men do to them that makes them feel ashamed. An adjective that friends, co-workers and other prostitution survivors have used on several occasions to describe me is “inspirational”, and the number of times that word has come up in post-presentation evaluations tells me pornstitution survivor friends and co-workers aren’t just blowing smoke up my ass when they say that’s what my writing and public speaking makes them feel, inspired. Of all the compliments I’ve gotten, being told I’ve inspired someone remains my favorite.
I know you deride every study on human sexual behavior as worthless, but in case there’s someone reading who shares my opinion that’s not true I want to offer up some research announced this week purporting that arresting tricks is a major deterrent to repeated solicitations of prostitutes: A Large Specific Deterrent Effect of Arrest for Patronizing a Prostitute.
“We compared clients of prostitute women in Colorado Springs first detected by the police and those first detected by public health in terms of their rates of arrest. Our analyses indicate that arrest reduces the likelihood of a future patronizing arrest by about 70%. Clients first detected by the two sources were similar in demographics, locality of residence, and patronizing behavior, and these factors could not account for the large difference in arrest incidence by first detection source. Moreover, evidence from other parts of the US indicates little displacement of patronizing to other jurisdictions or sectors of prostitution following an arrest for patronizing a street prostitute. Taken together, our results suggest that apprehending clients decreases their patronizing behavior substantially.
Our findings contrast starkly with prior reports of no specific deterrent effect of arrest among young offenders for other types of offenses [11]–[15]. Arrest may be a significant deterrent for clients because they generally are otherwise law-abiding men [29] (Brewer et al., unpublished data) who could suffer loss of reputation and marital or romantic relationship conflict as a consequence of arrest. Such themes are often apparent in clients’ comments at arrest, both as others have noted [30], [31] and we have observed in arrest narratives from several jurisdictions.”
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Sam says:
Check out what the researchers have to say about the non-debate prostituted women have over the term “sex worker”. Sex worker is a term pro-john advocates and sexee feminists love to wank themselves over in displays of how much toleration they have for the prostitutes whose objectified sexuality they use to boost their sexee public personas. Jessica Valenti once asked me why I use the words whore and ho and suggested it’s because I hate prostitutes, “Do even consider sex workers people? Because this kind of derogatory language really makes it seem like you have nothing but disdain for them”, and recently she again pulled this navel-gazing feminist cannard out by suggesting for no reason that makes sense outside insular privileged whitegirl feminism circles that most prostitutes want to be called commercial sex workers. Actually, most prostitutes reject the term sex worker.
As I replied to her then, I use the words the women themselves use and don’t whitewash those women’s truths with a top-down imposed euphemism that spares the lunching ladies of NOW from spitting out their $100-a-plate overcooked chicken. What these researchers say about the term is what I’ve learned to say about it from my dealings with prostituted women and activists who work extensively with them. They do not label themselves “sex workers”, that’s what people who can’t come to grips with the truth of their lives call them.
The Compact Oxford English Dictionary (http://www.askoxford.com/dictionaries/) defines a “prostitute” as “a person, typically a woman, who engages in sexual activity for payment.” Nothing in this long-held definition implies that prostitution is not work, especially when compared to definitions of other activities that people perform in exchange for money, goods, or services.
The term “sex worker” (or its redundant expanded form, “commercial sex worker”) is a much broader term more recently invented by advocates and adopted by some in public health to refer to prostitutes. However, as used in the literature, this term also includes many roles beyond that of prostitute, such as those involved with striptease, pornography, paid telephone sex, etc. Consequently, “sex worker” is an imprecise label that obscures the referent’s actual behavior.
The term “sex worker” is often employed by those with a political agenda to decriminalize or legalize prostitution. In contrast, we take no political position on the legal status of prostitution. We study prostitution in the legal context in which it currently exists in the USA, has existed for many decades, and is likely to exist for some time to come.
In our experience, prostitute women sometimes refer to themselves with the term “prostitute,” but more often use terms that public health officials, advocates, and the general public typically find vulgar and offensive, such as “working girl,” “wh*re [full term filtered by PLoS One],” “hooker,” or simply “ho.” Over the past 30 years [1-14], we have successfully engaged prostitute women on their turf, in our clinics, and other settings, as we strived to address their health and social problems with evidence-based strategies. We treated these women with respect and kindness, and they reciprocated with steadfast cooperation in our studies. Our colleague, Donald Woodhouse (personal communication), informally canvassed prostitute women in Colorado Springs in the early 1990s about the term “commercial sex worker” and encountered universal disdain for it. One woman said, “I’m no commercial sex worker, I’m a ho.” The debate over “appropriate” terminology has otherwise never surfaced in our interactions with prostitute women, and the use of the term “prostitute” in scientific forums certainly has not hindered our work with them.
Prostitute women are stigmatized and marginalized, but the terms used to refer to them neither cause nor alleviate their low status. Abandoning a widely understood, specific, descriptive term for a vague one, though, can impede clear scientific discourse.
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henderson says:
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henderson says:
http://www.adelantefoundation.org/
One note on microloans. They are given to abuse. Be careful of bad guys. Deal only with the incorruptable.
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henderson says:
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cicely says:
There are not large numbers of women want prostitution legitimized as work. It has been well established you haven’t got one iota of research or other collected information to prove this assertion.
I’m not sure where you’re going with this given the number of feminists and sex workers involved in this debate. Anyway, here’s a link to a site listing 146 web addresses on the issue, all but 19 of them being sex worker advocate sites. Many of these will no doubt link to yet further sites…
http://www.iswface.org/linkpge.html
The use of impersonal pronouns does not effectively distance your accusation that I don’t really care about women from if you had just come out and said, “You don’t really care about women.”
You either missed or ignored where I wrote in the middle of my statement that anti-prostitution feminists do believe that the course they’re taking will ultimately improve the lives of women. I have never and would never say – categorically – about any feminist – that she doesn’t care about women. I admit I was expressing a certain level of frustration about the focus on sexuality. I am of course aware that this extends beyond the issue of prostitution itself – that this is just part of a broader ideological perspective which I don’t share. (I don’t think you share all of the ‘anti’s’ in feminist prescriptions for the ideal expression of sexuality either. Correct me if I’m wrong.)
In feminist-political terms I place it next to “But women rape too!” and other ignorable diversions from the much larger problem of confronting epidemic male violence.
Well, that’s a bit thinner than I’d hoped for. It’s this one-dimensional focus I have problems with. I feel as if someone’s got my head in a vice (excuse the pun) – trying to prevent me from looking sideways.
If you genuinely respected other victims of trafficking instead of just using them to try and score Swedish model-bashing points then you would not ask for proof slave-wage factory workers want out of their exploitive situations.
There you go. What an asshole I am! It seems I don’t care very much about or have respect for anybody… Two points to you! I don’t criticise the Swedish model for any other reason than that I think it’s the wrong approach for the reasons I’ve stated. I think I’m pretty clear about those.
Sam: Men prove in word and deed in every way possible that they hate women generally and prostituted women particularly enough to rape and murder them in numbers unparalleled to other groups of women.
cicely: Opportunity and stigma. Both of which the whole of society is responsible for.
Sam: Fuck no. Don’t you smear women’s hands with the blood men spill. Women don’t share anything close to equal power with men but you’re an eager beaver to accord women half the responsibility for the rapes and murders of prostituted women. Men are responsible for 97% of rapes and 90% of violent crimes, and trying to pin 50% of men’s rampaging femicide on women serves the patriarchal purpose of diminishing the true extent of men’s violence. Only men benefit from covering up the extremely lopsided truth about men and the misogyny they visit on women’s bodies.
Whoops.I slipped up there. I meant patriarchal society, of course. This is a tight game and I should be more careful – knowing how you will pick up the loose ball and run with it…
cicely: How doesn’t keeping sex workers out on a limb, powerless and stigmatised targets for the rest of society – its opinions and its violences – feed as much into patriarchal ideas about women and sexuality as anti-pornography and anti-prostitution feminists say the very existence of these occupations do?
Sam: Underlying this question is the nonsense fantasy that legitimization of men’s right to sex on demand gives sex workers power and destigmatizes them. There is no proof this is true and a lot of proof that it’s a false hope.
There is a *very* large transition to be made, a helluva lot to be undone, before de-stigmatisation of sex work can occur. It’s not going to happen overnight under any legislative circumstances. It’s not going to happen at all wherever either party in a consensual adult commercial sexual exchange is criminalised (and the most vulnerable people doing sex work have little to no hope of safe working conditions.) Whichever party societies contempt is reserved for – currently the service provider – and most particularly when that person is a woman – and in your perfect scenario the purchaser – most often a man – it’s not a healthy situation, in my opinion. *If* the sex industry were ever to disappear it should be because of some as yet largely unimagined development(s) in honesty and behaviour around sexuality, not because it’s outlawed.
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cicely says:
I have also read comments by prostitutes who prefer to be called prostitutes who don’t do so as a signal that they aren’t interested in decriminalisation or safety and health protections etc. They claim the word – and others – because they refuse to be shamed by them. (Much as lesbians reclaimed the word ‘dyke’.) They don’t refer to their vaginas as ‘wet-holes’ and the like though, as far as I can tell.
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cicely says:
Oooh, my comments are all green and skinny! They didn’t preview this way. Are you able to fix this, Violet? Or have you gone away to play for the holidays…..
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Sam says:
No comment on the study of the effectiveness of arresting tricks?
”What an asshole I am! It seems I don’t care very much about or have respect for anybody”
Maybe you are an asshole, I don’t know. I’ve never met you and know almost nothing about you outside your opinions on prostitution. Those opinions I consider harmful and disrespectful of prostituted women’s pleas for help escaping men’s sexualized violence regardless of what you intend with them. Not completely regardless, actually, because it’s my belief in your general pro-woman intentions that forms my words where if I didn’t think you had such intentions I’d construct my argument differently.
”I don’t criticise the Swedish model for any other reason than that I think it’s the wrong approach for the reasons I’ve stated.”
That’s kind of the problem; stating something is much different from backing those statements up with evidence and rationales explaining why the evidence looks the way it does. You can say throwing poodles out a window makes them learn to fly but that isn’t enough to justify repeatedly throwing poodles out a window hoping for results different from the splatty results of the first, tenth or hundredth attempts. Prostitution legitimization is a very old scheme tried in many eras and places around the world and it has never advanced women’s human rights.
”There is a very large transition to be made, a helluva lot to be undone, before de-stigmatisation of sex work can occur.”
Here’s one of the numerous times pro-pornstitution folks want to have it both ways. Often I hear, as you’ve written in post 43, that men using prostitutes has been around since the beginning of time and it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon so that’s why prostitution should be legitimized as good-enough women’s work. Now in post 162 prostitution should be legitimized so the stigma can be slowly chipped at because even if it takes 1000 years you’re holding out for the day men will order whores like pizzas without the raping, choking, slashing, murdering or otherwise hurting them that goes on currently when they order whores like pizzas.
Is male entitlement to the leisure activity of sex on demand from women eternal or not?
It’s so easy to forget prostitution is mostly defended as a leisure activity for men. If men playing poker spread as much slavery, AIDS, child rape, and murder as men playing john no one would try to defend poker’s right to exist despite the devastation it leaves in its path. I cannot agree that the life-ruining global human rights violations perpetrated against tens of millions of women and children are acceptable costs to provide a form of men’s entertainment. Women’s bodily integrity, health and lives are worth more than a few moments of dicksticking amusement for men.
You speak of removing the stigma of pornstitution without accounting for the way men find the anti-woman stigma the biggest attraction to using prostitutes. It’s not sex selling porn titles with innumerable variations on “dirty little cumslut meat tunnel fuck pig Lolitas”, it is anti-woman stigma being sold. There is no other way to account for men in the Netherlands avoiding legalized brothels in favor of prostituted slaves trafficked from Asia and Eastern Europe being pimped out of illegal brothels fronting as saunas and massage parlor. There is no other way to account for the legal age of entry into prostitution being 13-years-old.
Tricking men do not want legal, clean and regulated sex workers. Your whole position is based on the precept that we can give tricking men enough clean and regulated purchasable pussies to make them happy, but what makes tricking men happy is humiliating, hurting and “dirtying” women they call whores, bitches, flea-bitten hoes, nasty cocksuckers, stretch mark sluts, and other hateful epithets for females found prominently throughout the pornstitution industries.
This ties back to the point I made in the recent thread about people who like pornography thinking sex is dirty less than they think women are dirty. It is less sex selling pornography than anti-woman stigma selling pornography, as the words I’ll copy here propose:
“’Do people who like pornography think women are dirty?’ Taking my linguist’s eye to the evidence I’d say this is technically a more accurate way to pose the question. The adjectives modify the prostituted women more than the sex.
I did my big senior project in linguistics on gendered language and queer speech, and one of the questions I had to answer was why words for gay men in various languages evoke feminized images like fairies, butterflies and birds. The question led me to ask which came first, the ‘dirtymaking’ of sex, the sexualization of females, or the ‘dirtymaking’ of females. Are gay men despised because they are seen as sex personified and sex is seen as dirty, or are gay men despised because they are seen as women and women are seen as dirty?”
I didn’t answer there what my linguist opinion on words for gay men stems from, but I’ll tell you here that my investigations lead me to believe the feminization of gay men is a more salient point of their hatred than their sexualization. Prostitution documentaries aka pornography bears out a similar hatred and revulsion of femininity far and above the negative feelings evinced about sexuality. That’s a small part of why I think you’re wrong to focus on “sex negativity” instead of “woman negativity” when it comes to prostitution.
The United States has gotten more conservative, capitalist, and militarist in the past 15 years it has been the world’s #1 fuckumentary maker and headquarters for the explosively-growing pornography cumglomerates. This is not the contradiction liberals knee-jerking against conservatives think it is but the reasonable end result of a capitalist society where sexuality is controlled not by repression but by consumption. Like Dubya telling Americans after 9-11 that they should go shopping for freedom’s sake, consumption controls people bred to be consumers more effectively than repression because it plays on desire.
I was a postmodernist before a feminist so I’m going to quote Foucault on repression and power as I understand them in light of pornstitution’s widespread permissibility and availability.
From Power/Knowledge:
“…power would be a fragile thing if its only function were to repress, if it worked only through a mode of censorship, exclusion, blockage, and repression, in the manner of a great Superego, exercising itself only in a negative way.”
“If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression.”
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cicely says:
As these last few posts are difficult or slow to read because of the way they’ve come out, I’ve been printing them off. If you have a printer and get that box that comes up after you’ve clicked on ‘file’ then ‘print’ that has a place for entering page numbers ‘from’ and
‘to’, page number 92 is the beginning of the problem and if you enter some large number like 110 as the ‘to’ number, you’ll get all the comments from then on.Also – I just got the error message re the security number, and hopefully have successfully copied and pasted this long post to ‘word’, so I can try to post it again. Apologies in advance if the layout is strange…
Sam – I think I *have* addressed the issue of the effectiveness of arresting clients overall, whether it’s in Sweden or the US or anywhere. I’m opposed to criminalisation of prostitution perse – full stop. It matters not to me whether the service provider or the
client is the criminalised party. I do not have as an endgoal the legally enforced elimination of prostitution, therefore the effectiveness of laws that lead in that direction are of no interest to me. Such laws exist for the wrong reason(s), imo. They penalise consenting adults in a liberal society for a victimless commercial exchange, (even if it is for – yes – a leisure activity) along with those who are actually committing crimes such as rape, other violences or criminal exploitation. I think, of course, that the abuses within prostitution desperately need to be addressed. This is certainly achievable with decriminalisation. I’ve noted here before the instance of a prostitute in New Zealand achieving the prosecution through the courts of a client who had removed a condom during intercourse without her knowledge (at the moment) or her consent. Yes the penalty, as was pointed out, wasn’t very heavy, but the mechanism is there – it worked – and can be improved upon. I’m not sure if the client was publically named as well, but I believe that this should definitely also occur along with any related criminal conviction.I’d like to discuss further the issue of stigmatisation. Noting what you wrote about yourself – that you took part in threesomes with boys – but convinced yourself that you weren’t a slut because you didn’t go as far as penis-vagina penetration – what if there’d been no ‘low’ standard for you to fall to? No concept of a sexually curious, active and autonomous young woman being ‘fallen’, while the boys would have been elevated, regarded as ‘studs’, achieving kudos among their peers? (This is assuming you *were* self-motivated and not just responding to that ever present male pressure to make ourselves available to them regardless of our own desire or lack of…and no, being aware of that doesn’t lead to my not wanting prostitutes to have the work and therefore be available. A young woman might say ‘I don’t want to do anything with you and if you can’t find anyone else who does, you’ll just have to pay for it, I guess.’ I got called a cock
tease a few times in my teens. Great choice – cocktease or slut! Who am I again?)My point is that the stigmatisation of prostitutes serves to police and potentially stigmatise all sexually active women. There are ‘good’ women and ‘bad’ women, and even a certain style of dress can lump you in with the bad women. Or drinking too much, or swearing
too much or whatever. Selling sexual services is the bottom rung on a whole ladder that shouldn’t be there in the first place. It is there to keep male control over all female sexuality. And yet, funnily enough, and although it’s disguised or largely uncommented upon, the truth is that many prostitutes have historically been free to act well outside the patriarchal sexual and other contraints imposed upon ‘good’ women. Many have had personal and financial autonomy ‘good’ women could only dream of. And this while the ‘good’ women were having to submit to the conjugal rights of husbands they’d long since lost any sexual interest in, if they’d had any in the first place. This in exchange for their social standing and financial security. (And in western countries right up until the 1970′s.) Some have claimed that this amounted to forced prostitution, even though the service was only provided to one man.I think it’s still the case in NZ and Oz that any woman receiving a social security benefit can have that benefit withdrawn if she co-
habits with a man. The State will not provide for her if a man is in a position to do so with an assumption that he is having a sexual relationship with her. It’s up to the woman to prove that a co-habiting man is *not* her sexual partner. (Escaping this kind of
scrutiny is one of the few civil advantages of being a lesbian.)I believe the ugly misogynistic quotes you are wont to provide us with in such abundance are also expressions of men wanting to maintain control over female sexuality. Our job, as I see it, is to reveal these men as they truly are, which is bullies, desperate,
hypocritical, whingy, weak and ridiculous, like the beer-pot-bellied men who comment on how women have ‘let themselves go’. Working to remove the stigma from voluntary adult prostitution can only help in this endeavour. As I’ve said, it won’t happen overnight, but it can happen. -
Sam says:
“They penalize consenting adults in a liberal society for a victimless commercial exchange, (even if it is for – yes – a leisure activity)”
We’re not talking about consenting adults in victimless commercial exchanges, we’re talking about prostitution as it really is right now, not as you fantasize it could be 1000 years from now.
Your priorities as given here, protecting the harmful leisure activities of millions of tricking men over the rapes and enslavement of millions of prostitutes, is some whack value ordering that’s mighty fucked up.
“the prosecution through the courts of a client who had removed a condom during intercourse without her knowledge”
Now you know why tricks in the Netherlands and elsewhere prefer illegal brothels with illegal whores despite the legalization of brothel prostitution. Tricks want the kind of violent, dehumanizing, unsafe sex they can’t get from the wives and regular sex partners 85% of them have.
I’d like to discuss further the issue of stigmatisation.
You show no understanding of the main point of the last post. It is not sex that sells pornography, it is degraded femininity the pornography sellers latch onto. When you can understand this you’ll understand why men use prostitutes despite 85% of them having regular sex partners and 75% of them saying they’re satisfied with their sex life. Men using prostitutes isn’t about fulfilling men’s sex lives, it’s about fulfilling men’s sexist lives.
“A young woman might say ‘I don’t want to do anything with you and if you can’t find anyone else who does, you’ll just have to pay for it’”
If you read this imagined quote the way I do then it’s an admission that money coerces poverty-stricken women into sex with men they do not want. Coerced, unwanted sex is by definition rape.
Why do you insist men have the right to get their sexual demands fulfilled by poverty-stricken women who cannot refuse what other women reasonably refuse? Prostitutes are not some Other creatures that want innumerable strange men sexually using them in ways non-whore women don’t want to be used. What you’re saying is that if a man can’t earn consent from a woman he should find some poor woman desperate enough to submit to his sexual wants for badly needed money and that’s okay with you. Now you know why tricks in the Netherlands and elsewhere prefer illegal brothels with illegal whores despite the legalization of brothel prostitution.
After Dutch legalization, a further law was passed criminalizing johns who (ab)use drug addicted prostitutes because they found tricking men know how to get the most bang for their buck. Addicted women and runaway children let men anally rape them without a condom for $10 to get their next fix and tricks know a bargain when they see it. The new Dutch law did not stop the male predation on the most helpless victims of prostitution that eventually led to the closing of the experimental “tolerance zone” in Amsterdam a few years ago and the recent closing of 1/3 of legal red light businesses.
“My point is that the stigmatisation of prostitutes serves to police and potentially stigmatise all sexually active women.”
Bass ackwards, cicely. All women are seen by men as whores of varying degrees, as your analogy to wives supports. Many librul Nice Guys insist prostitution is “more honest” than spending money and time on a date without the assurance of getting some pussy at the end. Many librul women, myself included once upon a time, have thought that since women are getting fucked by men anyway we might as well get some money out of it. ”I want you to pay me for my beauty/I think it’s only right/cause I have been paying for it all of my life…I was 11 years old, he was as old as my dad…just give me something for my trouble cause this time it’s not a free ride. -Ani Difranco
You’re saying men have to be allowed to economically coerce sex from women too desperate to refuse said sex like more privileged women reasonably refuse said sex, and the male right to sex on demand should be legalized for the sexy freedom of non-ho women. Again, that’s some seriously warped priorities you got there.
“although it’s disguised or largely uncommented upon, the truth is that many prostitutes have historically been free to act well outside the patriarchal sexual and other contraints imposed upon ‘good’ women.
Happy Hookers are largely uncommented upon? Maybe in Bizarro Earth but not the one we live on.
This trite version of Happy Hookers given reminds me of my old white dude environmentalist friend who insists men really used to treat women with respect and kindness until the 20th century when feminists came along and made all the noble chivalry men used to show women in former centuries disappear. Men have never treated women with respect and equality and life was a whole lot worse for women 100 years ago. Then as now, life was especially short and rough for whores compared to other women in those pre-antibiotic days when 75% of women died in childbirth. A line from a review of the book Upstairs Girls: Prostitution in the American West:
”From Big Butt Annie and Raunchy Rachel to Big Nose Kate and Nellie the Pig, Rutter provides a less-than-titillating but highly readable account of the ‘working girls’ who rarely ruled the West and more often, simply served those who did.”
“And this while the ‘good’ women were having to submit to the conjugal rights of husbands they’d long since lost any sexual interest in”
You want women submitting to men’s perceived sexual rights despite a lack of sexual interest something that happens to women several times every day by multiple men and you call it feminist. To quote alyx, “Why is it ‘Victorian’ when a housewife engages in sex without actually enjoying it, but when a prostitute lies back and thinks of England, she’s a transgressive badass and role model?”
These two sentences of yours placed one after the other contradict each other spectacularly:
“Our job, as I see it, is to reveal these men as they truly are, which is bullies, desperate, hypocritical, whingy, weak and ridiculous, like the beer-pot-bellied men who comment on how women have ‘let themselves go’. Working to remove the stigma from voluntary adult prostitution can only help in this endeavour.”
I have no clue how the first sentence logically follows to the second sentence’s conclusion. Affirming every man’s right to pay to fuck Jenna Jameson look-alikes pseudonymously named Janna, Gemma, or Jaina in between fucking their clueless and not-as-stitched-and-siliconed wives and girlfriends exposes men who hate women as reprehensible, sexist bullies how? Reverses the growing global trends of human trafficking for sexual slavery how? Raises the average age of entry into prostitution from a child’s 13 to a woman’s 23 how?
Men don’t hate sex, they hate women. Men the world over already have, right now, access to all the pussy they can shake a wallet at and 80% of Thai men using prostitutes hasn’t made Thailand a feminist stronghold yet. How will legally offering men an endless smorgasbord of pokable pussies, anuses and mouths reduce their hatred of women when legal stripping, legal pornography, and legal prostitution have so far only accomplished the opposite? Don’t give some Pollyanna “I don’t know how, it just will, trust me” answer. How?
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Violet says:
Are you able to fix this, Violet? Or have you gone away to play for the holidays…..
Not to play but to finish wrapping presents and be sick (my whole family is ill except my brother, who is clearly Satan). The problem was an unclosed blockquote tag upthread, which I’ve now fixed. I’m so sorry for not seeing it sooner. This is a wonderful discussion and I’m grateful to both you and Sam for taking the time to talk to each other (and all of us reading along). Rock on.
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cicely says:
I’ve never met you and know almost nothing about you outside your opinions on prostitution. Those opinions I consider harmful and disrespectful of prostituted women’s pleas for help escaping men’s sexualized violence…
There’s nothing about my position that ignores the pleas of women wanting to escape prostitution. I just also take into account the pleas of women who do and will continue to choose prostitution ( very if not even most often over other available options) to be able to work legally, safely and with dignity. These are the women who’s pleas you ignore and who you like to pretend only exist in small numbers.
Now you know why tricks in the Netherlands and elsewhere prefer illegal brothels with illegal whores despite the legalization of brothel prostitution. Tricks want the kind of violent, dehumanizing, unsafe sex they can’t get from the wives and regular sex partners 85% of them have.
Now you know why legalisation isn’t an ideal approach. Total decriminalisation gives all prostitutes the protection of the law. There is no legal vs illegal prostitution and abuse is abuse. Re illegal though – in New Zealand there was and probably still is an issue with Thai women being trafficked and tricked into sexual slavery and the reason the NZ Human Rights Commission supported the law reform was because it believed it may help in creating an environment that is less hostile and more transparent to those victimised by the trafficking industry. The Immigration department also suspended the visa-free status between New-Zealand and Thailand, in part because of the abuse of the system by traffickers and others working illegally in the country.
How will legally offering men an endless smorgasbord of pokable pussies, anuses and mouths reduce their hatred of women when legal stripping, legal pornography, and legal prostitution have so far only accomplished the opposite? Don’t give some Pollyanna “I don’t know how, it just will, trust me”
You begin with equal human, civil and workers rights for sex workers across the board. You don’t corral (?) them into ‘special’ places with ‘special’ rules different from everyone elses, except those that pertain specifically to the work (as per other unique industries). As New Zealand was the first country in the world to do this (in 2003) we have yet to see the full impact of the law reform and what amendments may need to be made to improve it. But it’s a minimum requirement beginning to changing conditions and attitudes, imo.
What cannot be done via legislation must be done through cultural means. As I’ve mentioned before – fuller, deeper, more real and more varied portrayals of women in all forms of media including pornography need to be presented. There are, as you know, many feminists within the sex industry who are as aware as you are of the worst, most misogynist representations of women, and their contributions will be invaluable. Their understandings of what is degrading to women and what is not might not gell with yours, but, hey, they’re women too and have the right to their own interpretations.
Not a full answer yet, but work more than beckons, it has me by the scruff of the neck….back later…
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cicely says:
Thanks for the fixit job, Violet. I guess the culprit could well have been me. A 50/50 chance methinks ;) Anyway, I’ll try to be extra careful about closing my quotes off properly. Hey, I hope you’ve started feeling better so you can start enjoying these here special days.
There are some advantages to the decriminalisation approach to prostitution that I’d like to mention. In NZ back in 1999, before the law reform, the Human Rights Commission joined forces with various organisations including the Immigration Dept, the Police, the NZPC (New Zealand Prostitutes Collective), the Shakti Asian Women’s Centre and the Thai Embassy to set up a ‘safe house’ programme to assist Thai sex workers to escape prostitution in New Zealand. This linked to a women’s support organisation in Thailand so the women had support when they got back home as well. Pink information stickers written in English and Thai were put up in areas where the commercial sex trade was known to operate. They explained about the service and how to access it.
I imagine that since the law reform this kind of co-operative strategy can be even more effective in detecting and dealing with all kinds of abuses within prostitution. This would be impossible to achieve – to maximum effect – under any other type of legislative regime.
Also, with decriminalisation, it became the case that any person wanting to get out of prostitution can qualify immediately for a government social security benefit. Maybe they always could have, if they’d been prepared to risk stating what they’d been doing, but not knowing the consequences of such a declaration before, many might not have done so. What I’m saying is that practical possibilities open up for workers who want to continue *and* for those who want to leave, with decriminalisation.
Sam: These two sentences of yours placed one after the other contradict each other spectacularly:
cicely: “Our job, as I see it, is to reveal these men as they truly are, which is bullies, desperate, hypocritical, whingy, weak and ridiculous, like the beer-pot-bellied men who comment on how women have ‘let themselves go’. Working to remove the stigma from voluntary adult prostitution can only help in this endeavour.”
Sam: I have no clue how the first sentence logically follows to the second sentence’s conclusion.
On their own, yes, maybe. The context is back further in my comment. When prostitutes are not isolated from the rest of the community in terms of their legal status and begin to be and be seen to be regarded as fully integrated persons in society who happen to do sex work, it has to impact positively on the way they are perceived. At least, as I say, it can only help. I don’t think the Swedish approach helps a great deal on this front. A prostitute may not actually be a criminal there, but she is still complicit in a crime, and the client’s resentment about their own risk is likely to impact negatively, particularly among those who are already misogynists. (Which, Sam, you probably think is all of them, while I actually don’t.)
And so – decriminalising prostitution begins to remove some of the stigma. There is actually a degree of stigma attached to the sexuality of *all* women in patriarchal society in general, which can also be reduced when the ‘lowest of the low’ can start shedding theirs. Men want sex enough from women that they’re prepared in droves to pay their hard earned money to have it. That’s the fact of the matter. They have no business despising the women who sell it and no rational reason to. They have only the patriachal structures, myths and illusions about ‘the place’ of female bodies and sexuality, and what I’m saying is that it’s part of our job, as feminists, to smash those myths, illusions, control mechanisms, whatever we want to call them. They’re bullshit.
I just don’t happen to think the way to do that is to attempt to criminalise the entire sex industry. The male desire for sex with strangers isn’t going to go away, (and I don’t believe it to be immoral *or* intrinsically anti-woman) so we have to change the sex industries meanings where it currently demeans women.
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Sam says:
Look at how lickety-split men disappear from the scene in your last post. It’s as if men have nothing to do with prostitution’s varied horrors by your reasoning. According to you the fight to stop men’s outrageous violence against prostitutes has nothing to do with men taking responsibility for their actions and everything to do with women taking responsibility for men’s actions, even women in the sex industry are apparently responsible for stopping men’s abuses of prostituted women. Anyone but men who of course cannot and will not be held responsible for anything.
”These are the women who’s pleas you ignore and who you like to pretend only exist in small numbers.
Pretend exist in only small numbers? I pretend .00025% of women doing sex work in Germany joined the very attractive union ver.di? I pretend decades of research prove 9 out of 10 prostitutes don’t want to be prostitutes and 100% don’t want someone they love to have to prostitute? I pretend the average age of entry into prostitution is 13? I pretend upwards of 90% have substance addictions and it’s near universal they were raped more than once as children? All this I pretend while you paint a sepia-colored portrait of liberated whores in olde tymes and new?
Whatever you want to tell yourself, cicely. I’ll trust the people reading to make up their own minds about who’s pretending what about the lives of prostituted women.
“Total decriminalisation gives all prostitutes the protection of the law.”
You just get zanier and zanier in a not funny way. Where were NZ police officers in April 2005 when the naked body of prostitute Susan “Ritalin Sue” Sutherland was found in Christchurch? She was described as being in a disturbed state of mind the night she was killed after being chased down the street by people to whom she owed money. Note that she wasn’t murdered in a superduper top secret prostitution den but right out on the street in full view of several people and despite this her murderers were never caught.
Where were the NZ police in September 2005 when a Wellington brothel owner sold raping privileges to 24 men who wanted to rape a 14-year old girl in the care of Child, Youth and Family Services? That brothel owner was given a paltry sentence of 300 hours of community service for the organized rape of a troubled child.
I asked how legitimizing men’s right to pussy on demand reduces such organized child rape and you answered “The police.” The police are not a how, they’re a who. You haven’t explained HOW child rapists, pimps and traffickers are to be be found and punished efectively enough to deter them. If the above case is any indication, New Zealand officials think picking up roadside garbage while protecting the identity of a madam who pimps kids is supposed to be a deterrent for other enormously profitable child rape rings. Yeah, that’ll learn her and send the message to other pimps that child prostitution is wrong wrong wrong.
”You begin with equal human, civil and workers rights for sex workers across the board.”
Sweden does this and also takes the sensible preventive course of action by not ignoring the violators of women’s human, civil and worker’s rights as if they don’t matter. Sweden doesn’t give community service and identity protection to child rape organizers and that’s why prostitution has decreased dramatically in Sweden while New Zealand’s child prostitution, street prostitution, sex trafficking prostitution, and illegal prostitution problems have grown the past few years.
You’ll brush this aside like the rest of the times I’ve asked for proof decriminalization has led to a decrease in these harmful activities, but if the best result you can dig up on NZ decriminalization is that one man was made to pay a $300 or so fine for endangering a woman’s life by removing his condom then that’s awfully weak. Show me where child prostitution, street prostitution or human trafficking has gone down in NZ to impress me and make a case for your position. These forms of prostituted slavery have increased in New Zealand by all measures I’ve seen so far and you’ve shown me nothing to the contrary. Saying all studies ever done are flawed is not showing something to the contrary.
”As I’ve mentioned before – fuller, deeper, more real and more varied portrayals of women in all forms of media including pornography need to be presented.”
Yeah, I know the shoulda woulda couldas of what’s needed to change men’s minds about women’s subhuman status, but what you’re missing is the HOW. HOW will the changes in media we all know are needed to come about? What mechanisms are to be set in place to begin the shift to a more pro-woman perspective? The answer to that HOW is not “More positive portrayals of women in the media.” The answer to HOW a legalized sex industry leads to less misogyny is not “Employees of Penthouse and Hustler will stop sexual slavery and child prostitution.” As with the police, they’re a who, not a how.
How will Susie Bright raise the age of entry into prostitution from 13 to 21? By clicking her enchanted red shoe heels together three times? By personally offering to suck the cocks of men who refrain from paying to rape kids, drug addicts and enslaved women? By offering cash incentives to men who sign a pledge against abusing prostituted women? By passing an antirape law saying “and we mean sex workers too” that rapists will magically heed where prior rape laws failed to persuade? By passing a law that says pulling out a 16-year-old’s front teeth is evil as if the men who did that didn’t know? By sternly tsk tsking the 24 child rapists in the above case who were never charged or prosecuted for the crime of paying to rape a child because prostitution decriminalization does dick to stop child rapists and desensitizes people to the harms of sexual exploitation?
“Pink information stickers written in English and Thai were put up in areas where the commercial sex trade was known to operate.”
You got a study or some research proving the rape preventive effects on tricking men of pink information stickers written for trafficked women? I’d love to see some quotes from tricking men who say they’ve thought about choking and raping a prostitute but then read a pink sticker directing prostitutes to a refuge and that convinced them not to rape. What incentive, what action-causing lever, do ho-focused information stickers give abusive tricks to steer them away from raping prostitutes an average 33 times a year?
Not one rape of one woman has ever been stopped with the phrase, “But I support your right to pay for sex workers so don’t rape me!”
What you overlook is that Sweden does tremendous amounts of outreach to help prostituted women get off the streets and goes the extra effective, necessary bit by using the most productive social levers to dissuade rapists and sexual predators from preying on vulnerable people: arrest, exposure, and education about the truths of prostitution.
”When prostitutes are not isolated from the rest of the community in terms of their legal status and begin to be seen to be regarded as fully integrated persons in society who happen to do sex work, it has to impact positively on the way they are perceived.
Really? Where? Give some examples of sex workers being more positively perceived because of their legal status, “positively perceived” meaning the most important thing it can possibly mean, a decrease in violence against prostitutes and in trafficking of prostituted bodies for sexual slavery. The stripper whose story started this thread doesn’t appear to agree with you.
”decriminalising prostitution begins to remove some of the stigma.”
Your evidence for this decreased stigma is what and where? Oh right, there’s no evidence yet but by golly gee one day in the indeterminate future there’s gonna be some evidence, just keep throwing those poodles out the window and wait to watch them fly because any day now they’re going to start flying. Any day now. Any year now. Any decade now. In a century coming soon for sure.
”The male desire for sex with strangers isn’t going to go away”
I feel sorry for you in your submission to violent men and your shared belief with men in their entitlement to control women’s sexuality. How you accept defeat at men’s oppressive hands on behalf of millions of women and children begging to get out of the slavery, rapes, and tortures of prostitution with a “get used to it cuz men don’t change” is the mark of a woman who has given up on patria-capitalism’s most raped and murdered victims and decided their sacrifice by the millions is necessary for some indeterminate future’s sexy utopia where every woman’s cunt has a cover charge any paying client can pay his way into. Your brave new world looks astoundingly similar to the cowardly old world of male entitlement to sex from women on demand that is the root of all rape culture.
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Sam says:
I’ve been putting some thought into the idea men can’t change their sexual behaviors to lessen deadly harms like spreading AIDS or hurting women but women can and therefore men can’t be expected to change but women can. It dawned on me there is one lever of action-changing pressure that can be brought I don’t think has been attempted before.
Tricks fear arrest mostly because they fear being caught out on their prostitute use by the wives 60% have and the girlfriend/partners 85% have. If men are slaves to their sex drives and can’t change like women, maybe it’s time for a massive media campiagn directed at changing the reluctant attitude of women who are wives and girlfriends to tricks.
There could be a website, blog, ads and editorials written under an eye-catching logo and piquant title; how about “Janes of Johns School”? If men didn’t care about getting caught by wives and girlfriends it would certainly speed the way to prostitution becoming more acceptable as just a job. How would you construct the argument for women fully acepting and hopefully one day encouraging sex worker use among the men in their lives, from sex partners to fathers to sons? How could we convince wives to smile and say, “It’s just sex” when they learn their husbands are spending money on prostitutes?
This is what pro-pornstitution folks say they want, full acceptance of prostitution as a kind of specialized bodywork. If a boyfriend’s massage or Rolfing doesn’t arouse unsettling feelings of intimacy betrayal in a girlfriend then neither should paid-for fellatio or intercourse the claim proceeds. We could make guesses about which pro-prostitution feminists would be the first to come out publicly and say they are absolutely comfortable with their boyfrends and husbands paying for sexual services every now and again.
Think I could get a grant to fund this pro-sex worker’s rights education project teaching wives and girlfriends how to not feel a little queasy at the thought of the men in their lives using prostitutes regularly?
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cicely says:
Sam says:
I’ve been putting some thought into the idea men can’t change their sexual behaviors to lessen deadly harms like spreading AIDS or hurting women but women can and therefore men can’t be expected to change but women can. It dawned on me there is one lever of action-changing pressure that can be brought I don’t think has been attempted before.
Tricks fear arrest mostly because they fear being caught out on their prostitute use by the wives 60% have and the girlfriend/partners 85% have. If men are slaves to their sex drives and can’t change like women, maybe it’s time for a massive media campiagn directed at changing the reluctant attitude of women who are wives and girlfriends to tricks.
Sam, I just came back here to say I’m going to be offline for a couple of days, and I’ll give your previous post some thought while I’m away – and saw this. So, a quick comment now…
One of my little hobby horses, you may have noticed, is ‘let’s get honest about what’s really going on with regard to sexual behaviour, and particularly ‘mens’ sexual behaviour.’ All the ‘straight-acting’ ones who have secret and anonymous sex with gay men; all the fathers, husbands, boyfriends, brothers and sons (but not yours or mine or anybody elses who might be reading here) who visit prostitutes; all of the above rellies having secret liasons and affairs outside marriage and so on. I do tend to think that women are often wilfully naive about the men in their own lives – they just don’t want to know. Men no doubt advise their male friends to lie, so as not to upset the applecart at home, and to give what they actually believe women want – the illusion of sexual fidelity. Why would they believe otherwise? Women won’t risk upsetting the applecart either by actively encouraging the men in their lives to be honest. Maybe we need to take a good hard look at the applecart. A comment I read somewhere once went something like this: ‘I didn’t realise until now that when my mother told me mixed marriages were a bad idea she meant between men and women!’
Maybe a bit of honesty could help with that.
Being as I see myself as someone for whom a polyamorous relationship is ideal, I’d find this kind of honesty appealing. In my case it would be my partner being the one with other lovers since I – so far – can only be attracted to one woman at a time. But I like the idea of others being attracted to and made love to by my partner (and have had such a relationship – long term – for real) and I also like the idea of not having to carry the burden of being the sole person responsible for anothers sexual pleasure over a period of many years. But that’s just me. I’ve never really thought about how I’d feel about a woman partner visiting a prostitute though. It’s never ocurred to me before. Imagining it now – I’m not having a problem. Of course, this prostitute would very definitely be someone who didn’t feel coerced or financially deprived so that she needed to sell sex. It would have been a clear choice for her. She would be a performance artist who had no problems with the work and a full and rewarding life outside of it.
I guess I should duck and run now…
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antiprincess says:
We could make guesses about which pro-prostitution feminists would be the first to come out publicly and say they are absolutely comfortable with their boyfrends and husbands paying for sexual services every now and again.
guilty as charged.
as for your modest proposal – go for it. who knows but you might learn something useful.
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Sam says:
90% of what I’ve written in this thread is about male sexual violence and entitlement to use women’s bodies that women do not want to submit to and so are forced to submit by varying means. When I ceased momentarily with the taboo subject of male sexual violence and tossed out the not-taboo subject of a sexy liberated fuck-for-all approved by the sexiest of sexy openminded women, I heard from way over here the sigh of relief coming from you as you happily skipped past the specific examples and meaty denseness of everything in post 171. The opportunity to leave off on 13-year-olds, sexual enslavement, and 33 rapes in the average year and slip in a statement about how sexily openminded pro-john women like you are even enticed antiprincess to jump in with a “I’m a sexee opeminded girl too, yes I am.”
There have always been women, such as the goodly wives referred to in your above quote “And this while the ‘good’ women were having to submit to the conjugal rights of husbands they’d long since lost any sexual interest in” who would prefer other women suffer the sexual impositions and violence-suffused demands they would rather not be burdened with. That’s why there has always been a large underclass of whores available to husbands and there have always been wives willing to look the other way at the mostly poor, brown-skinned, substance-addicted children and women sexually (ab)used by men.
Research about incest shows many a mother sacrifices her children’s bodies and mental security to incesting husbands. White wives in the American south during slavery were as resigned as you are now to men’s insatiably lusty genetics and were relieved to let black women slaves take the penetrations, gaggings, rectum lickings, discharge eatings, animal fuckings, chokings, whippings, etc. the white women had the privilege to refuse. I’ve written about the severe racial divide at the Toledo conference tables in post 74 and the willingness of many feminists to use prostitutes as sex objects doing the dirty whore work while they keep their own hands clean but sexy-by-association in post 117.
You wrote about a hypothetical woman, ”A young woman might say ‘I don’t want to do anything with you and if you can’t find anyone else who does, you’ll just have to pay for it’”, a perfect example of this kind of privileged Othering of prostituted women. The very idea that it’s all right for men to sexually prey upon poor people lacking the practical right to refuse disgusting, painful, humiliating sexual invasions sickens me.
I asked this before and would like an answer now: Why do you insist men have the right to get their sexual demands fulfilled by poverty-stricken women who cannot refuse what other women reasonably refuse?
I’ll remind you of a nasty bit of masculine unpleasantness the whole patriarchal world conspires to forget:
You speak of removing the stigma of pornstitution without accounting for the way men find the anti-woman stigma the biggest attraction to using prostitutes. It’s not sex selling porn titles with innumerable variations on “dirty little cumslut meat tunnel fuck pig Lolitas”, it is anti-woman stigma being sold. There is no other way to account for men in the Netherlands avoiding legalized brothels in favor of prostituted slaves trafficked from Asia and Eastern Europe being pimped out of illegal brothels fronting as saunas and massage parlor. There is no other way to account for the average age of entry into prostitution being 13-years-old.
Tricking men do not want legal, clean and regulated sex workers. Your whole position is based on the precept that we can give tricking men enough clean and regulated purchasable pussies to make them happy, but what makes tricking men happy is humiliating, hurting and “dirtying” women they call whores, bitches, flea-bitten hoes, nasty cocksuckers, stretch mark sluts, and other hateful epithets for females found prominently throughout the pornstitution industries.
”Of course, this prostitute would very definitely be someone who didn’t feel coerced or financially deprived so that she needed to sell sex.”
Unfortunately, because of the men-hating-women conditions I’ve just reminded you of and the fact that there is no such thing as risk-free sex, there are exceedingly few women willing to prostitute themselves as men would have them be prostituted. Liberals chide the idea that men are having a lot more sex than women with the commonsense point, “Then who are the men fucking if not roughly equal numbers of women?” (for now we’ll put aside the average workload of a woman in a legal German brothel is 10-20 men a day). Applied to prostitution, such philosophies should lead feminist advocates of legitimized prostitution to realize they need to offer their own bodies for the sexual use of anyone with the money or else they condemn poverty-stricken, beleaguered children and women to human trafficking and prostituted slavery. It is not enough to approve of men and your sex partner using prostitutes, you have to figure out where the millions of pretty women’s bodies men currently enslave in prostitution will voluntarily come from.
I believe it’s a conservative estimate that there are about 40 million prostitutes in the world, but is the most generous estimate of worldwide feminists anything close to that?
The mistake you keep making is in thinking prostitution is more about sex negativity than woman negativity. People fuck a lot, and almost always for free. Tricks get a lot of free sex. Among truckers in Africa, some of the worst spreaders of AIDS, men commonly have not only a wife but a girlfriend or two and they (ab)use whores regularly. You mistakenly think you can raise the social status of whores without fully comprehending how the hatred of women leads to Russian doctors being paid less and treated less professionally as women overtook the profession. It’s not sex or the healing arts that are the problem, misogyny is the root cause. Efforts to raise the status of doctors in Russia are going nowhere until men’s revilement of all things tainted by femaleness is addressed.
To get back to some of the really great points I raised in unsexy post 171, here’s a summary of what I think would be most fruitful for you to address:
I asked how legitimizing men’s right to pussy on demand reduces such organized child rape and you answered “The police.” The police are not a how, they’re a who. You haven’t explained HOW child rapists, pimps and traffickers are to be found and punished effectively enough to deter them.
Where were the NZ police in September 2005 when a Wellington brothel owner sold raping privileges to 24 men who wanted to rape a 14-year old girl in the care of Child, Youth and Family Services and got only 300 hours of community service and the the right to identity protection? Sweden doesn’t give community service and identity protection to child rape organizers and that’s why prostitution has decreased dramatically in Sweden while New Zealand’s child prostitution, street prostitution, sex trafficking prostitution, and illegal prostitution problems have grown the past few years.
Yeah, I know the shoulda woulda couldas of what’s needed to change men’s minds about women’s subhuman status, but what you’re missing is the HOW. What mechanisms are to be set in place to begin the shift to a more pro-woman perspective?
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henderson says:
tee hee. La Vita Loca. It’s coming. Have fun with that, ladies.
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henderson says:
Here’s a recent story. a Colombian girl went to Spain to be a prostitute. she was traficked there as part of a rotation thing that Brothels do. she was poor as a church mouse. She went to Spain to earn money. After about 7 years she earned enough money to go back to Comumbia and buy herself a house. Where she resides today – out of the industry.
She was pee peed on for money. Of course she didn’t like it- being an old fashioned sort. Now, yes, some liberated type ladies do like being pee peed on. But stigma aside. It’s kinda yucky and unhygenic for most girls. Stigma or no stigma. Or smegma as the case may be. She worked for seven years in a rotation sequence ( guys don’t like to do the same girl twice) at brothels all over Spain. Men paid to go pee on her and other interesting and liberated things.
Anyway, happy ending- she’s okay now and living in her house in Columbia where she always intended to return to after her “sacrifce” and adventure in Spain. Not all these stories end bad.
Next time i’ll tell you the story of a 7 year old. It’ll be great. but I promise to have a happy ending. No depressing stories. The great thing about people is that they are resiliant as hell.
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henderson says:
By the way ladies, i dont do internet type studies. i do personal stuff. Beleive me or not. Don’t care.
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henderson says:
I don’t know if men would want to pay to go pee pee on a girl if things were legal. or maybe if she were very liberated and modern or more open minded and stigma was taken away that would change. Wouldn’t know about any of that. Of course, she just one gir. It’s not like there were thousands like her or anything.
I’m still big on Women in Business. Not the pee pee business. I’m too narrow minded on that. other business. Women in Business helps other women. happens evey day.
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henderson says:
For the kids in the audience. Buzz off. You’re too young. For the ones who like to look it up- that’s Golden Showers. It’s delightful and modern. If you’re not into it- you’re just not with it.
Che ricroglionito.
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henderson says:
Opps misspelled that/ who cares.
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henderson says:
I’m being a smart ass.
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henderson says:
Che rincoglionito! Oh! foul mouthed. shame on me.
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henderson says:
I switched from my Bud Light and now I am drinking some somthing stronger.
I’ll call her BC. BC was came fromm a family where he mother was poor then married a rich American who was viewed as hero who could do no wrong. Her mother had a rare thing where she didn’t have any hair. BC had two younger sisters. BC for whatever reason was visited nightly by her father. He had anal, oral and vaginal intercourse with her. She was threaghtened with death and the heart break of her mother if she told. Unfortunatley she told me. Like I could save her. I could have done without it. Anyway, they had her pegged as being retarded. She acted it too. But she wasn’t. What she was- was greived. She greived, and acted retaredd as a defense mechanism against the nightly abuse. She was 11 when it started and went on for years. Her hiney was having problmes after a couple of years. And a doctor was needed. It’s important to give men the things they “need” or want sexaully, you know.
Now I know that in some culturese this is perfectly okay. In some cultures so is child marriage, and female circumsion. So I guess that in some cultures that’s a happy story. little girl was stark raving nuts from sadness. She was a tough cookie though. Not in a liberated, de stigamtiswd sense. but in another way. Now her Dad. he was good too. No stigma for him. He was stylin’ becuase he lived in a modern world with modern support group around him. The community in which they lived was used to messing around with their children. Because, after all- in other cultures it is okay. Joy to the blasted world.
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henderson says:
But the 7 year old. Who I may tell about later. That kid had a happy ending. One tough mO fO. Incorruptable. Untouchable.
women can be stronger than all get out. Except when they drink bud light.
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henderson says:
Don’t worry enlightened ones. I’m not making a point about this subject. I’m a little drunk, tired and having the first day of my period. So I’m just unloading and lost all my self control. You all have yourselves a nice day. Men of the audience, please don’t be scared. It will pass.
Although, lately, it’s funny how we influence each other bad. I’ve had the biggest urge to say F%$#ck off to some people. I never have ever said those words to anyone before. I learned it from Belldame. -
cicely says:
…I heard from way over here the sigh of relief coming from you as you happily skipped past the specific examples and meaty denseness of everything in post 171.
I wasn’t happily skipping past anything. What I wrote was:
Sam, I just came back here to say I’m going to be offline for a couple of days, and I’ll give your previous post some thought while I’m away – and saw this. So, a quick comment now…
Sam: To get back to some of the really great points I raised in unsexy post 171, here’s a summary of what I think would be most fruitful for you to address:
I asked how legitimizing men’s right to pussy on demand reduces such organized child rape and you answered “The police.”
No, I didn’t. I mentioned co-operation between the Police, The NZ Prostitutes Collective, The Human Rights Commission, The Immigration Dept, The Shakti Asian Women’s Centre, The Thai Embassy and a Women’s support centre in Thailand as the ‘who’, and while not all the mechanics of the ‘Safe Home’ campaign, the pink sticker bit as part of the ‘how’, with regard to dealing with the issue of the trafficking of Thai women into sex slavery in NZ. With regard to the whole situation in NZ, as I have repeatedly said, I have a wait and see approach. It’s early days (less than 3 years since law reform) and I await the 2007/2008 review of the outcomes of decriminalisation to date and whatever amendments or initiatives might arise from that. I would protest a return to criminalisation though, which may or may not happen if the government changes at the next election.
I have to say, Sam, that you are in the habit of presenting some of the problems women face and feminists battle (The Russian doctor situation for example) as if I am unaware of them, despite my having stated here that I’ve been a feminist since possibly before you were born (i.e. the mid 70′s) and even a radical feminist according to Violet’s definition. We (you and I) both acknowledge that misogyny exists, that it goes deep, and that it’s largely centred around female sexuality. Thus, I am not surprised by misogynistic attitudes expressed around pornography or prostitution or anywhere at all for that matter. The debate you and I are having is over what should be done about it, vis-a-vis prostitution in particular.
I asked this before and would like an answer now: Why do you insist men have the right to get their sexual demands fulfilled by poverty-stricken women who cannot refuse what other women reasonably refuse?
I don’t. I insist that women have the right to assess their own situations and make their own decisions about whether or not to choose prostitution as a means of earning an income. (note how that statement precludes any kind of coercion, and I don’t regard choosing between poorly paid agricultural work, factory work or domestic service as coercion.) It can’t have escaped your notice that in the two or three places you and I have met up in the blogosphere it’s 99% feminist women on both sides of this arguement, along with women who are ex or current sex workers.
Also, while they may be few in a world context in comparison with economically deprived women who enter prostitution, there are a significant number of women who do so because of financial or convenience ‘want’ rather than need. And some because they like sex too. They should have the right to do what they choose to do with their own bodies. They should not be forced to submit to either right wing conservative morality or anti-prostitution feminist ideology, with a bit of it’s own morality sometimes thrown in. Eg, to suggest, as you sometimes seem to do, that these women and their supporters are somehow responsible for the plight of their poorer sisters seems grossly unfair and illogical to me. As I’ve said before, poor women will continue to choose prostitution under any legislative regime (including Swedens where the number of prostitutes per head of population has always been comparatively low, and the social welfare system is among the very best in the world) and if you can’t alleviate their poverty, you can’t help them stay out of prostitution. It is a far better and more practical thing to do to make their working conditions as healthy and safe and unstigmatised as possible.
I am opposed to criminalisation not only from the liberal standpoint, but also because I view it as a denial of women’s agency (past, present and future) around our own bodies and sexuality. That is, I see it as counter-productive in feminist terms. I see great similarities between early 20th century reformist attempts to ‘rescue’ prostitutes from male violence, male lust and the social stigma and the contemporary anti-prostitution feminist position. The view is that in prostitution *all* women are always and only ever victims. There have always been prostitutes who dispute this and in earlier times as now, they struggled to have their whole perspective and experience heard. (The internet has certainly helped these women create a community like never before though.)
Another discussion to be had somewhere, if not in this thread, is prostitution as performance. I’d like to finish with what I think is an apt quote for *this* conversation from Kirsten Pullen’s book ‘ Actresses and Whores – On Stage and in Society’ (published 2005 by Cambridge University Press. Page 164).
Madison sex workers switch from performed femininity to normalcy constantly as they move between work and private lives, and noted the difficulty of maintaining boundaries. This dificulty is hardly surprising as they had to perform both banality and hyper-sexuality, switching from one frame of reference to another as they fit their appointments between boyfriends, classes, parties and homework. The girls also wanted to blend in with their peers, keep their sex work hidden, and appear normal and average. For example, Alex reported sometimes feeling uncomfortable in her women’s studies classes.When the other students railed against the oppression of the pornography and prostitution industries, Alex maintained an uncomfortable silence.
” I’ve taken some women’s studies courses. They’re cool. But when everybody starts talking about prostitution and porn, I just sit there or else go along…They’re talking about how these women are *victims*, but I’m thinking about how much I really like Gary (a client), and how much fun it is to get all dressed up and make $150.00 for sex. And I like sex, and I like having sex with Gary, and, you know, with *most* of them.”
Alex was required to perform a version of feminism that opposed her own experience as a sex worker in order to seem like her classmates.
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Violet says:
I’m trying to catch up on the last several dozen comments, so I’m going to post my responses in no particular order.
From the article cicely cited in comment #132:
Sex work is usually better paid than most of the options available to young, often uneducated women, in spite of the stigma and danger attached to the work. In all four of the countries studied, sex work provided significantly higher earnings than other forms of unskilled labour.
This article is extraordinarily disingenuous. It’s a kind of half-truth that manages to obscure reality. Here’s the reality: women do most of the work in the world. Globally, women support the human race: they do all the work men do plus almost all of the domestic labor.
In what we call the developing world, women’s labor is generally unpaid. They’re not unemployed; in fact they are run ragged doing the bulk of the agricultural and domestic labor that supports society. A woman’s work is never done. She’s just not paid for it.
Meanwhile, men’s work is paid labor, and if a man doesn’t have a paid job, he’s “unemployed.” So while the women are run ragged growing food and hauling water and cooking and doing every goddamn thing that needs doing, masses of “unemployed” men sit around in villages discussing their unemployment problem and bossing women.
And still the women work, night and day. For no money.
Now what if one of these women wants to earn cash money? The only job men will pay her for is fucking. It’s really a great system men have: a woman is trained from birth that it is her job to do the labor that supports society (including men) for no pay. If she wants cash, prostitution is the only paying gig. Fabulous system. For men.
That’s why women in Latin America and the Caribbean and Southeast Asia become prostitutes: because the patriarchal system decrees that women’s labor is virtually worthless — even though it’s the labor that keeps society afloat. The only woman’s labor men will pay for is fucking.
In the cities now there are some other options, but the general attitude that women’s non-fucking-labor is of little value prevails. That’s why factory work, for example, pays so much less than being a prostitute.
To say that women under these circumstances are “choosing” prostitution is a little bizarre. Imagine that you’re a peasant who works night and day to feed your family. You want cash so you can buy yourself a warm coat, but the only way anyone will give you enough cash to buy a coat is if you sell one of your kidneys for transplant. So, you sell your kidney. Are you “choosing” to do this? Well, yeah, I guess so, but jesus fucking christ. Anybody who can’t see the economic coercion there and the grotesqueness of the system is blind.
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Violet says:
Regarding the Jo Wheldon article cicely linked to in 125:
I have to agree with Pony (comment 126). Propaganda. I don’t know anything else about Jo Wheldon, so I may be wrong, but my gut reaction is: bullshit. Reading it, I thought to myself “no wonder they uninvited her from the panel.” Not because she was a sex worker or liked being a sex worker, but because of the powerful whiff of intellectual dishonesty emanating from her writing.
The whole thing seems crafted to throw doubt on the studies and statistics (the kind Sam keeps citing) about the lives and attitudes of sex workers. No data, just insidious questions: “can we be sure that sex workers are telling the truth? Perhaps they’re lying because they feel guilty about whoring? Maybe stigma is the problem?” It’s crafted to give the impression that feminists who oppose prostitution are caught up in a “good girl-bad girl” paradigm. (Notice how Wheldon explained her uninvitation from the panel as being because she wasn’t a “good” girl, properly repentant of her past). She even claims that prostitution-abolition organizations enjoy the bulk of feminist support, which is laughable.
The whole thing — the tone, the tactics — reminds me very much of the pro-porn strategy adopted by Larry Flynt, et al. Which is amazingly effective. Go on any pro-porn feminist website and mention the abuses in the porn industry, the documented rapes, the way underaged prostituted girls are videotaped being raped and the result sold as porn — mention any of that and I guarantee you people will say, “How do you know? How do you know those statistics are real? Maybe the girls are lying because they feel guilty about being in porn…” You’ll also be told that feminists who oppose this horrific abuse of women are really just prudes who are hung up on a “good girl-bad girl” thing and want to punish people who like or participate in porn, etc., etc., etc. And you’ll definitely hear how anti-porn feminists are Big Bad Censors and the poor little pornographers are just struggling for their rights to free speech — not unlike the way Jo Wheldon paints herself and the pro-prostitution lobby as poor little underfunded Davids battling Goliath. (As for the reality — who’s David and who’s Goliath — see Sam’s comment #74.)
I’m going to say again that I don’t know anything else about Jo Wheldon and I may be wrong here, but that’s my gut reaction.
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Violet says:
I haven’t even finished reading Sam’s comment #165 but I must comment on this:
It’s so easy to forget prostitution is mostly defended as a leisure activity for men. If men playing poker spread as much slavery, AIDS, child rape, and murder as men playing john no one would try to defend poker’s right to exist despite the devastation it leaves in its path.
Hell fucking yeah. Millions of women raped and abused, their souls eaten through, little girls destroyed — for the sake of men’s leisure activity.
To continue the analogy of organ buying/selling in my comment above: the buying of organs for transplant is illegal for a number of reasons, one of which is because society as a whole considers it obscene to take advantage of poor people’s desperation in that way. The ills far outweigh arguments about people being able to do what they want with their bodies, or why shouldn’t poor people go where the money is, etc., etc. In fact there are a number of interesting parallels between the blackmarket in organs and prostitution, with the key difference being that while society deems organ buying too deleterious to tolerate, the buying of women is just fine. Yet organ transplants are a life-and-death matter. Using prostitutes is just a leisure activity for men.
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cicely says:
Now what if one of these women wants to earn cash money? The only job men will pay her for is fucking. It’s really a great system men have: a woman is trained from birth that it is her job to do the labor that supports society (including men) for no pay. If she wants cash, prostitution is the only paying gig. Fabulous system. For men.
Yes, it is a fabulous system for men but how does it help the women in these actual situations to have the only cash earning option available to them a crime and so stigmatised an activity that on top of being punishable, it’s also what makes the women among the most if not *the* most despised members of society? They are punished every which way for taking the only initiative they possibly can. And how would the Swedish law criminalising the men help women in this situation?
What is unpalatable for many other women, and especially anti-prostitution feminists, is the only option for these women. Fact. So, go ahead – do your damndest to take it away or make it even more difficult and dangerous and – to boot – why not tell *them* as is told to women who enter prostitution without any great need to do so – that they’re letting the side down? I’m sure one more little burden wouldn’t break their backs or spirits.
You know, not that I’m saying it’s never been done, but I’d like to see an anti-prostitution debate here with frames of reference that specifically exclude discussion of women who are physically, economically or in any way forced into prostitution. I think anti-prostitution feminists rely heavily on the circumstances of these women, who they can’t help anyway (without addressing *all* the inequities in these women’s lives), to divert discussion from the question of prostitution perse.
Prostitution in different forms has always existed at the top end as well as the bottom end of societies, and has *not* always been, as it isn’t now, only engaged in by women who literally have no other choice. Should these women have the right to choose?
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Violet says:
Cicely in comment 166 said of anti-prostitution laws:
They penalise consenting adults in a liberal society for a victimless commercial exchange, (even if it is for – yes – a leisure activity) along with those who are actually committing crimes such as rape, other violences or criminal exploitation. I think, of course, that the abuses within prostitution desperately need to be addressed.
As I read this, cicely, you’re separating the act of buying sex from the bad stuff that surrounds it, which you label the ‘abuses within prostitution’:
Victimless commercial exchange: the actual transaction whereby one human pays another human for sexual contact.
Abuses within prostitution: pimps, trafficking, slavery, rape, beatings, etc., etc., etc.
Logically this is a reasonable distinction, and makes sense for a theoretical discussion about the nature of the sexual exchange itself, whether it can be separate from women’s status as the sex class, whether the abuses are intrinisic, etc.
But the problem from a pragmatic standpoint is that regardless of the conclusions of the aforesaid theoretical discussion, the fact is that at least 90% of prostitution as it exists today is characterized by those abuses that you’ve separated out as not part of the definition. The pure unsullied “victimless commercial exchange” is probably rather rare.
Now, the reason this matters was brought home to me with the coverage of the Ipswich murders. When you de-couple the abuses from prostitution in public discourse, the abuse part quickly goes by the wayside. Men sure as hell don’t want to hear about it, and neither do pro-prostitution women. Although some 90% of prostitutes are abused by pimps and victims of rapes and so forth, all that stuff is no longer part of the definition. It’s a gift to johns everywhere that prostitution is defined as a “victimless commercial exchange” that may or may not have some ancillary “abuses,” but those abuses are no longer part of the definition so we don’t have to worry about them, do we?
In the coverage of the Ipswich murders I was sickened by the interviews with johns and pro-prostitution men in Britain, who all claimed that prostitution was a “victimless” transaction. As far as I can tell the prostitutes in Britain are as abused, poor, homeless, desperate, and drug-addicted as ever, but legalization has spread the word that Prostitution = Victimless Commerical Exchange. And boy oh boy, the men have taken up that mantra with a vengeance. No abuses here, nope, nothing to see. Just a victimless commercial exchange. And this from men who were paying homeless glazed-eyed drug-addicted women to have sex on the hood of cars.
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Violet says:
And how would the Swedish law criminalising the men help women in this situation?
Actually I think the Swedish law makes sense in the same way that it makes sense for the law to penalize rich people who want to buy organs for transplant, not poor people who are willing to sell their organs. Just as the law penalizes (theoretically!) slave owners, not slaves; sweat-shop manufacturers, not the sweat-shop workers.
I don’t think poor women who trade sex for cash are doing anything wrong. I think the system is wrong. The core problem is that women’s non-fucking-labor is valueless. Men pay women for fucking, and not much for anything else.
That’s why I don’t understand how endorsing this economic system will somehow fix it. Consider the peasant who slaves like an ox but whose labor is unpaid, and the only way he can raise cash is to sell his kidney to a rich person. Would the solution be to say, Okay, let’s do what we can to make the kidney-selling legal and to make the peasant feel good about it, we’ll even set up organ-transplant clinics where the peasants can easily go to sell their body parts, etc., etc.?
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cicely says:
In fact there are a number of interesting parallels between the blackmarket in organs and prostitution, with the key difference being that while society deems organ buying too deleterious to tolerate, the buying of women is just fine.
Prostitution of itself is not actually the buying of whole women (or men or transgendered people), Violet. It’s the buying of their sexual services in a specific time-frame. When I spent eight hours a day emptying freshly cooked pies out of their tins the company (Purity Foods!!) didn’t own me. I had a life outside those factory walls. My hands performed the same activity over and bloody over and I was rooted to the spot – yes – and I resented it – yes – and for fuck all money and to be treated like a time-set machine – yes – but my hands weren’t chopped off and my mind wasn’t unfree to wander. I could still scratch myself, give someone the fingers (an old way of describing an ‘obsene gesture’ in case this is unrecognisable to younger viewers), think about whatever I liked, and make plans which included my mind all my body parts. Prostitution is what a person does, not who she or he is.
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Violet says:
So, go ahead – do your damndest to take it away or make it even more difficult and dangerous and – to boot – why not tell them as is told to women who enter prostitution without any great need to do so – that they’re letting the side down? I’m sure one more little burden wouldn’t break their backs or spirits.
I’m not sure where you’re coming from here. I don’t think women who enter prostitution are letting their side down, and I certainly don’t think poor women who trade sex for cash — the only cash they can get — are doing anything that I wouldn’t do probably in the same circumstances. The problem is the circumstances.
Can you imagine being a woman in Haiti, for example, who works 18 hours a day in the fields and in the house while the “unemployed” men sit around in the village square talking about their unemployment? Can you imagine working yourself to the bone, working yourself to exhaustion without ever getting paid for any of it, because that’s what women do, that’s women’s work? And realizing that the only way to get some cash money is to let yourself be fucked by the drooling creep next door? Or to go down to the American hotel on the beach and be rented by the hour?
See, to me the problem is all about women as the sex class and the value (or non-value) of women’s labor. I don’t know how you can even start to crack that nut as long as you’re endorsing and enabling the system that makes women’s sexual labor the only thing men value.
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Violet says:
Prostitution of itself is not actually the buying of whole women (or men or transgendered people), Violet. It’s the buying of their sexual services in a specific time-frame.
Yes, you’re right. But my sentence still stands if you change “buying women” to “buying women’s sexual services.”
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cicely says:
As far as I can tell the prostitutes in Britain are as abused, poor, homeless, desperate, and drug-addicted as ever, but legalization has spread the word that Prostitution = Victimless Commerical Exchange. And boy oh boy, the men have taken up that mantra with a vengeance. No abuses here, nope, nothing to see. Just a victimless commercial exchange. And this from men who were paying homeless glazed-eyed drug-addicted women to have sex on the hood of cars.
‘As far as you can tell’ is the key phrase here. The poorest, most every which way disadvantged prostitutes are the most visible. Who knows how many ‘invisible’ (to most of us) prostitutes exist? There’s a heirarchy in the sex industry just as there is everywhere else. It’s my belief that it’s far more important to address the real social ills that surround the most risky commercial sexual activity than it is to focus specifically – and negatively – on that activity. (and I’m talking about the prostitutes activity here, not the clients. As I’ve said, this debate for me, from a feminist perspective is about the *women’s* agency.) It will most likely be the most desperate individuals (the 40% visibly remaining in the industry according to Sam’s figures) who are still working as prostitutes in Sweden. There’ll probably be some determined souls there also who just don’t want to be controlled and have come to their own conclusion, for their own reasons, that sex work is the way they want to continue earning an income. I won’t say for sure, but it must be a possibility. God, I’ve got so heated in this discussion, (and being the rebellious soul I am), that I’ve allowed the thought to enter my mind that I could just go out and and sell some guy a handjob, or even a full (with protection of course) fuck! I’d just have to let him know up-front that I’m very limited on the acting bit. Hoping not to be flamed for this remark, but telling it like it is. Not actually planning to do it.
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Violet says:
I think anti-prostitution feminists rely heavily on the circumstances of these women, who they can’t help anyway (without addressing all the inequities in these women’s lives), to divert discussion from the question of prostitution perse.
I think to anti-prostitution feminists, circumstances are part of the question itself, not a diversion.
To put it in terms of the distinction between the central (neutral?) fact of sexual exchange versus the abuses surrounding it, it’s the abuses that are the problem. That’s why we’re talking about it.
Consider the organ-transplant analogy (I get stuck on certain analogies when I find them productive). Is there anything intrinsically wrong with one human being freely selling her kidney to another human being? If you isolate that exchange from all the surrounding social issues, is there anything wrong with it? Probably not. So why the hell is it illegal? Because the buying and selling of kidneys would, on a social level, lead to grotesque abuses. The act itself may be morally neutral, but within a social matrix we can readily see how it would lead to, and be enmeshed in, a system of extreme economic and physical exploitation.
A lot of things are like that. Potentially lethal gladiatorial combat, for example, is illegal — and before you say that example is a couple of thousand years out of date, actually the regulations governing boxing are about precisely that sort of thing. But taken in isolation, why shouldn’t two men battle each other to the death for the pleasure of spectators? If everybody wants to? No reason, really. The problem is what would happen (and has happened) if that sort of thing were allowed systemically: extreme economic and physical exploitation.
Turning to the issue of prostitution, what concerns me is not the issue of one human being freely selling her or his sexual services to another. You mentioned in your comment just now about selling a handjob or a full fuck to some guy – but why is that the issue? It isn’t to me. The issue to me is that 90% of prostitution exists within a matrix of pimps, traffickers, rapists, abusers, sexism, and a global sexual-economic system that devalues women and women’s non-sexual labor. For me, talking about prostitution aside from all of that is like talking about the gladiatoral games in Ancient Rome as if they were just isolated cases of free men choosing to fight for the entertainment of their friends, ignoring the actual matrix in which the games took place – a massive and top-to-bottom system of slavery, trafficking, economic exploitation, physical brutality, bloodlust, class distinctions, prejudice, etc., etc., etc.
To continue the gladiatorial analogy: if we were Ancient Roman sociologists we would also discover that a few gladiators, say from Thrace, were very well-paid and loved their jobs and considered gladiating the best thing since the aquaduct. They would be the equivalent of the Happy Hookers, the putative 10% of prostitutes who are doing fine and like their jobs. We don’t need to deny the existence of the Thracian gladiators anymore than we need to deny the existence of the Happy Hookers. But it doesn’t change the fact that the overall gladiatorial system — like the overall prostitution system — is horrific.
I’m still getting caught up on these comments!
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Violet says:
I should add, by the way, that all these analogies are imperfect. There’s nothing exactly like sexism or gender issues; there’s no perfect analog to the male-female situation.
I also don’t think sex is just like any other work, though needless to say I reject entirely the traditional view of sexuality as a “moral” (read: patriarchal values) issue. Comparing sex work to other work holds to a point and can be useful for sorting through these issues. But I do think it’s just simple realism to acknowledge that for most human beings (not all) the act of mating carries different connotations than any other sort of “labor.” We’re animals, mating is a particular and unique part of our animal life, and for most of us (not all) mating is not going to be naively analogous to, say, carpentry or cleaning stairwells or doing people’s taxes.
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Violet says:
Cicely in 166:
I think it’s still the case in NZ and Oz that any woman receiving a social security benefit can have that benefit withdrawn if she co-
habits with a man. The State will not provide for her if a man is in a position to do so with an assumption that he is having a sexual relationship with her.That’s astounding. Like, my jaw is open astounding. We don’t even have that in America.
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Violet says:
Sam in 167 says:
Now you know why tricks in the Netherlands and elsewhere prefer illegal brothels with illegal whores despite the legalization of brothel prostitution. Tricks want the kind of violent, dehumanizing, unsafe sex they can’t get from the wives and regular sex partners 85% of them have….men use prostitutes despite 85% of them having regular sex partners and 75% of them saying they’re satisfied with their sex life. Men using prostitutes isn’t about fulfilling men’s sex lives, it’s about fulfilling men’s sexist lives.
I want to talk about this a bit. Why do men go to prostitutes? Sam, when you look at the current situation you conclude, reasonably enough, that since these men already have sex partners it’s because they want weird sex/brutalizing sex/paid rape/whatever they can’t get at home (and they themselves say this).
But this has not always been the case.
As a historian, I know absolutely that a hundred years ago, for example, many single men in European countries went to prostitutes because that was what men did if they wanted to have sex and they weren’t married yet. Most of them (not all!) didn’t want degrading brutal sex; they just wanted to get laid. If you could get in a time machine and interview, say, young men in Paris or St. Petersburg in 1900, you would find that most of them were not visiting prostitutes because they wanted to rape a woman or beat up a woman or because they wanted the thrill of fucking a 13-year-old slave, or whatever. Some of them, yes, but many men visited prostitutes simply because they wanted straight vanilla sex and that was the only way to get it.
My point here isn’t to excuse these men or pretend that prostitution used to be okay. What I’m trying to get at is the enduring motivation that keeps driving men to prostitutes throughout history. I’m not positive that it’s a desire to degrade women. I’m not positive that it’s a desire, conscious or otherwise, to exert dominance over women, though dominance over women is unquestionably part of the system that makes prostitution possible.
What I really think is that men will simply take every kind of sex that’s available to them. That’s a gross generalization about the male half of the species, but I’m just thinking aloud. In a Victorian society men took all the sex that was on offer: from wives, from official mistresses, and from prostitutes. Today men take all the sex on offer: from their girlfriends, from their wives, from prostitutes, from sex slaves while they’re on holiday in Thailand, from the porn on their computers. The motivation for the extra-marital (really “extra-official”) sex will always be something along the lines of, “It’s not what I’m getting at home. It’s something else.” The actual “something else” changes depending on the circumstances. For the Victorians it was the straight vanilla sex they couldn’t get yet because they weren’t married. Now it’s degrading thrills for men who have regular partners.
This is probably why when you legalize prostitution, and men have the opportunity for sex from girlfriends, wives, legal prostitutes, etc., they’re still voracious for even more: now there’s the chance of sex with 12-year-olds from Thailand who’ve had their teeth knocked out! Whee! More sex!
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Violet says:
Cicely in 187 said:
Eg, to suggest, as you sometimes seem to do, that these women and their supporters are somehow responsible for the plight of their poorer sisters seems grossly unfair and illogical to me.
Okay, now I think I understand where the “letting their side down” comment came from.
Has Sam intimated that prostitutes and their supporters are somehow responsible for the plight of their poorer sisters? At least in this thread, I think what Sam has objected to (and I’ve objected to) is the pro-prostitution lobby’s efforts to erase the reality of the 90%. It’s never “yes, 90% of them are miserable, but we’re fine!” It’s always, “sex work is just a choice! Those anti-prostitution radicals are cooking the books!” Overstating, but that’s the feeling one gets.
By the same token, I hear your continued pleas to have the 10% acknowledged as well. And I acknowledge them. It’s like the Thracian gladiators: their existence doesn’t refute the horrors of the system for the majority, nor do the horrors of the system for the majority make the Thracian success stories go away.
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Violet says:
From comment 171:
Cicely: The male desire for sex with strangers isn’t going to go away.
Sam: I feel sorry for you in your submission to violent men and your shared belief with men in their entitlement to control women’s sexuality.
Sam, I want to point out that acknowledging the reality (or what seems to be the reality) of men’s sexual impulses is not the same as signing off on the idea that men’s behavior cannot or will not change.
I generally avoid arguments that smack of essentialism, but consider if my point in 201 is correct, that the impulse to have as much sex with as many women as possible is a common trait among male humans and always will be. Even if this is true, it doesn’t follow that prostitution is inevitable or even that patriarchy is inevitable. Culture is everything. Matrifocal cultures, as far as I know, generally do not have prostitution, certainly not in a systemic way. Whereas of course the widespread reification of women’s sexuality is the hallmark of patriarchy.
Similarly, the impulse to violence is unquestionably a recurring and enduring characteristic among humans, but culture determines how it’s dealt with. Ancient Rome was a brutal society that considered murder entertainment, while among the Semang warfare was non-existent and homicide almost unknown. Is this because of genetic difference? Of course not. It’s culture. I’m sorry to belabor an obvious point, but I do want to draw the distinction between male sexual impulses and (culturally conditioned) male behavior.
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cicely says:
As I read this, cicely, you’re separating the act of buying sex from the bad stuff that surrounds it, which you label the ‘abuses within prostitution’:
Victimless commercial exchange: the actual transaction whereby one human pays another human for sexual contact.
Abuses within prostitution: pimps, trafficking, slavery, rape, beatings, etc., etc., etc.
Logically this is a reasonable distinction, and makes sense for a theoretical discussion about the nature of the sexual exchange itself, whether it can be separate from women’s status as the sex class, whether the abuses are intrinisic, etc.
But the problem from a pragmatic standpoint is that regardless of the conclusions of the aforesaid theoretical discussion, the fact is that at least 90% of prostitution as it exists today is characterized by those abuses that you’ve separated out as not part of the definition.
Excuse me if this looks like a bit of a sidestep, but I think the problem I’m having, in very simple terms, is that two wrongs don’t make a right. If it’s not intrinsically harmful or wrong (and I don’t believe it is) to buy or sell sexual services (and selling them doesn’t inevitably and immediately invite permanent injury as does the sale of organs), then how can any law making it so, under any circumstances, be right? The abuses are wrong, the sexist economic order and the rest which hugely and cruelly disadvantage women around the world are wrong, but there’s no quick and easy solution to it all. Women *need* to take control over our own bodies re birth control and abortion and our sexuality. We need to define ourselves for ourselves. We can’t put it off. My thing is that we *must* imagine ways to help the women who say themselves that they want and need help to get out of prostitution that don’t simultaneously maintain outside control for *all* women, and don’t maintain a stigma around women’s choices around sexuality and prostitution and all sex work where it *is* a free choice, not made out of desperate economic need. This feels like an insoluble dilemma at the moment. And I’m also one of those people you’ve mentioned, Violet, who has directly experienced the very negative impact of Mackinnonite ideas around sexuality when they had the ascendancy among lesbians who were also feminists. I don’t want that shit (in my view) getting a foot in the door! I always ultimately come down on the side of people who demand the right to choose and be themselves sexually, if they’re not directly hurting another person in the process. It doesn’t matter to me if they’re in a minority – even if in this case they’re the privileged minority – a right is a right, and it’s still one being fought for, not one that’s actually been won in any whole country in the world except New Zealand. I can bring all the logic I can muster into this debate, and I think I’ve probably said all I can, but this is the bottom line for me, I think, and I guess ultimately it’s emotional.
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Violet says:
If it’s not intrinsically harmful or wrong (and I don’t believe it is) to buy or sell sexual services (and selling them doesn’t inevitably and immediately invite permanent injury as does the sale of organs), then how can any law making it so, under any circumstances, be right?
In the same way that organ-selling is outlawed because of the potential for systemic abuse. If you don’t care for the organ analogy, go with the gladiatorial combat analogy, which is actually rather closer: entertainment for paying customers at enormous risk to the participants, most of whom had little or no real choice in their occupation and endure astonishing physical abuse for other people’s kicks.
But there are lots of things like that — types of dangerous work that are outlawed, etc. — where individual acts might be neutral but the potential for extreme physical and economic exploitation on a system-wide basis is undeniable.
That of course is where BB, et al, are coming from with the “don’t care about the 10%” argument. It’s not so much not caring and certainly not about wishing to deny women’s agency; it’s about making a hard calculation of the greater good. Which society does all the time.
However, I want to make it clear that while I sympathize with that reasoning, I myself am also concerned about the 10% who are exercising choice. That’s why this is a difficult problem. I don’t know what kind of solution will work for the casual happy hookers AND the sex slaves in Thailand, the Haitian peasant, and so forth. But actually I do want women everywhere to own their own bodies and have the right to do what they want with them. I just think that owning one’s own body, exercising agency, isn’t even on the table for 90% of the world’s prostitutes. That’s not how the system works.
I know you believe the overall solution is decriminalization, but I’m not sure. In some situations that might very well be the appropriate thing, and with you I eagerly await progress reports in New Zealand. But in much of the world — well, remember Thailand? I came to the conclusion that whether prostitution was legal or illegal, all it amounted to was two different ways for women to be exploited. And talk about agency and choice and removing stigma makes sense for some Western prostitutes and so forth, but to talk about that as if those are the key issues for the Thai slave and the Haitian peasant is, I think, missing the boat.
That’s why I keep yammering on about “the system! the system!” I feel like a crazed Marxist on the street corner, but really I feel we need to pull back and see the Big Picture. The big picture not being a binary legalize or not? (just determine who gets to pick the prostitutes’ pockets?), but the whole effed up system whereby women are paid for fucking and not much else.
That’s a tall order, but hey: 150 years ago our foremothers in feminism were starting from square fucking one, trying to take on the whole goddamn world of patriarchy. We can think Big.
One point I want to make is that I am not sure that stigma plays the same role you think it does. You said somewhere above:
How society feels about what people – particularly women – do with their genitals is the source of the stigma and, I suggest, a not insignificant portion of the alienation experienced by people actually doing the work.
As I read that, the implied corollary is (very roughly):
If women’s sexuality weren’t stigmatized, prostitution wouldn’t be so bad.
Whereas, very roughly but based on what I know of anthropology and history, I would suggest that:
If women’s sexuality weren’t stigmatized, prostitution might not exist.
Or at least, large-scale prostitution.
It’s at least worth considering that (as far as I know) prostitution doesn’t occur in matriarchal societies. That the buying and selling of women’s sexual services goes with patriarchy. Of course it’s too much to extrapolate from anthro studies to the modern world, etc., I know that, but what I’m pointing to is that I think the stigma thing might work more like this: that the fact of prostitution, the fact that women world-wide are the sex class, we all know it, every woman is a potential whore, is all part of why and how women’s sexuality is stigmatized.
This is one reason to consider that what Sweden is attempting is actually not illiberal but breathtakingly bold: trying to re-shape attitudes towards women’s sexuality. Women aren’t for sale. That’s the message of patriarchy, that we’re owned by one man or rented out by the hour. Madonna or whore. Sweden says: No. Not. Destroy that automatic equation between women’s sexuality and something men can buy.
Is that foolish and impossible? Well, in isolation it probably is. Sweden is a little island in a world of patriarchy. But I’m profoundly sympathetic to the intentions there.
Of course you will ask, quite rightly, how does launching a big quixotic attempt to re-shape world ideology help prostitutes right now? And that’s a good question. But by the same token, how does decriminalizing/legalizing prostitution help the Thai slave and the Haitian peasant who are at the mercy of forces far bigger than anything legal status can change?
Very difficult issue.
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Violet says:
My thing is that we must imagine ways to help the women who say themselves that they want and need help to get out of prostitution that don’t simultaneously maintain outside control for all women, and don’t maintain a stigma around women’s choices around sexuality and prostitution and all sex work where it is a free choice, not made out of desperate economic need. This feels like an insoluble dilemma at the moment.
I agree with you on all of this, including the part about the insoluble dilemna!
I want to take this moment to thank you and Sam for the enormous care and effort you’ve put into this thread. I apologize for coming along after a month and responding to a zillion things at once (so much Violet all at one time!), but I wasn’t able to follow the thread closely in December. Reading over it I’m just astonished at the depth of thought here, and the careful discussion, and I want to honor that the only way a blogger can, by sticking my own big oar in! (Is that the expression, cicely?)
I also want to reiterate that I have immense respect for both of you and while occasionally in the heat of the moment you may doubt this about each other, I am personally never in doubt that both of you are deeply feminist women who want the best solution.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I think you are both correct in some key points. And airing out these issues does help, it helps all of us trying to think through and analyze and understand and maybe, maybe, come up with a plan. This kind of dialogue doesn’t happen often enough, and I thank you both.
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Sam says:
I await the 2007/2008 review of the outcomes of decriminalisation…I would protest a return to criminalisation though
There’s no point awaiting the outcomes of a report when you’ve already made up your mind to oppose criminalizing pimps and tricks no matter what the report says. The weight of a world’s worth of evidence proving men can’t have their whores and not hate them to death too has not yet and will not soon convince you otherwise. That’s as good a point as any to end my participation debating you in this thread. Thanks for the opportunity to write my mind and for the time it took to write your mind too.
Cicely: “The male desire for sex with strangers isn’t going to go away.”
Violet: Sam, I want to point out that acknowledging the reality (or what seems to be the reality) of men’s sexual impulses is not the same as signing off on the idea that men’s behavior cannot or will not change.
There’s acknowledging the current reality and then there’s extrapolating from the present into what the future will bring. Men’s current sense of entitlement is not an issue of debate because we’re all fairly agreed on that, but men’s continued sense of entitlement perpetuated by legitimizing and encoding into law men’s belief in that entitlement to sex on demand is the contended issue.
What I really think is that men will simply take every kind of sex that’s available to them.
I agree, and that’s why I have to disagree with you that there was ever a class or category of women that has not had men force sex on them. Then as now, men use prostitutes in addition to using other women sexually, not instead of. As surely as I believe in men’s and women’s voracious sexual appetites because sex feels good, I don’t believe prostitution was the only way single men or unmarried women in Victorian England got sex.
People fuck. A lot. They always have and I think it’s likely they always will because sex feels good. Unmarried women in Victorian England fucked too, not as much as men with their many more outlets for sexual self-satisfaction, but enough that a fairly extensive system of so-called “Magdalen asylums” for pregnant single girls did brisk business at the time and well into the 20th century.
I don’t think men’s motivations for paying women to submit sexually have changed much over time because I agree with you that men will take the sex they think they have a right to. That men have decided female=fuckable means the “right to sex” category has included since time immemorial the rapes of all classes and categories of women, the incesting of female children, and prostitution of all kinds.
I believe Victorian men in England rape their kids for much the same reasons men do today, because they know they can get away with it. Men from both time periods raped women as much as they thought they could get away with and they used prostitutes as much as they thought they could get away with. The trend has been that where men’s entitlement to sex is greater there are more incest victims, more rape victims, and more prostitution victims. I’m open to seeing if there are places where prostitution thrived while incest & rape didn’t, but I don’t think Victorian England is an example of such a place.
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Sam says:
An anecdote on stigma spurred by Violet.
At one conference, a program arresting tricks was detailed where they tested the men for STDs. I asked the presenter if the wives/sex partners of the men who test positive for STDs were alerted to the danger they’ve been exposed to like how HIV+ gay men’s partners were tracked down in the late 80s to try and warn them they might have been infected.
The presenter said they didn’t do that and thought it was a good idea, but then a sex worker rights woman in the audience said that notifying tricks’ sex partners of their risk for an STD would be discriminatory against sex workers because it gives the impression that prostitutes spread sexually-trasmitted diseases. I thought then as now that the potentially hurt feelings of prostitutes do not override controlling the spread of deadly STDs to women who are unaware of the serious risk they’ve been put in by their husbands, especially not with many studies confirming cheating husbands are giving AIDS to their wives in staggering numbers.
These aren’t my social circles and I’m a bit young to have been aware of gender politics in the 1980s, but I don’t remember anyone concerned that tracking down at-risk gay men to warn them of potentially contracting a deadly disease should not be done because it might hurt the feelings of stigmatized gay men.
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cicely says:
That would be ‘your big fat oar’, Violet. You make good points as always, but, and I feel that overall you and I are in a similar spot with you leaning slightly more one way perhaps and me slightly the other.
Maybe prostitution would not exist in a perfect scenario, and maybe it would. But if it did, it would look very different and be understood very differently to the way it is now.
I agree with you that it’s ‘the system’. The prostitution issue is not going to be resolved around the world until the economic and educational, not to mention religious and other political ones are, at bottom. That is, no legislative system will work everywhere as things are, as in save women from exploitation and danger. Oh, will the time ever arrive when no-one lives in ‘interesting times’, if you know what I mean. Yes, utopia.
Thanks so much for this place where our conversation was possible, Violet, and thankyou too, Sam, for all your thoughts, time and effort in engaging with me over these last few weeks. I believe we both gave and got a good airing!
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cicely says:
Sam says:
cicely says:I await the 2007/2008 review of the outcomes of decriminalisation…I would protest a return to criminalisation though
Sam: There’s no point awaiting the outcomes of a report when you’ve already made up your mind to oppose criminalizing pimps and tricks no matter what the report says.
I was going to let this late little bit of trickery go through, but I’ve changed my mind. The important middle bit you omitted from the quote was:
and the amendments and initiatives that might arise from it.
It’s my opinion that decriminalisation has created a previously unavailable national opportunity for new initiatives to emerge. It’s like breaking through gravity. The starting point is that the commercial activity is not illegal – now let’s address the attendant problems that still exist around it. I am not expecting that these will have been solved, and possibly new and different ones will even have arisen. For me though, in a relatively wealthy western liberal democracy in the 21st century, decriminalisation is the right starting point. You believe the Swedish law is the right starting point, and these are the two approaches I believe the whole world is watching, with many feminist advocates for both. It’s a fork in the feminist road. (is it just me, or is ‘fork’ a funny word?)
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Liz says:
Violet, Will you please expalin this to these idiots here?
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Violet says:
I’m sorry, Liz, but if I were to go somewhere with that many twits sucking all the oxygen out of the air, I would die from asphyxiation.
