Of course I do, but I really don’t think Sweden is failing to address “underlying root causes” of prostitution.

Well maybe that’s because there’s more “underlying root causes” than you’re willing to accept.

1) Yes. Not in real life, thank goodness, but online–I’ve heard people who claim to be prostitutes who say violence is no big deal,

See, I can’t help but think that if I said something like “there’s no reason that someone can’t be a prostitute and also be stupid”, maybe in relation to $1000 a night call girls who take the money to go bareback, that someone might call me out for “blaming the woman.” But I dunno, surely a generous interpretation of this would be that they weren’t “happy hookers” but people trying to desperately justify their own life choices. And an ungenerous one would be that this particular hooker was dumb. But then, I guess since I define “happy hookers” as “hookers who are happy” rather than “a political subset of hookers and johns who are in favour of legalising prostitution because all hookers are secretly happy”, that might be why we disagree.

2) An agenda that wants, for whatever reason, to popularize a rosy picture of prostitution.

Goodness. So an agenda that just wants you to stop conflating streetwalkers on drugs with their own experiences as a freelance escort wouldn’t qualify then? Nice to know.

Is telling someone about their own experiences as a hooker who manages to be happy count as “popularising” it? Should these girls just stfu because they’re confusing poor simple minded folks who might not be able to tell the difference? Or, perhaps, might there be some common ground to reach by, maybe, incorporating their experiences into a broader understanding of what hooking means up and down the spectrum.

Is it possible that there’s some hidden mass of prostitutes not visible to the researchers’ eye?

You mean “not on the streets”? Yes, because that’sthe consensus. The authorities don’t really know how many prostitutes there are because, get this, they’re not in the traditional places and they’re harder to count. Let’s face it, it’s not the first time that crime statistics have failed to accurately represent crime.

Moreover, those likely to be affected negatively and invisibly by this are, as usual, those in the most vulnerable positions. If a hooker’s doing $40 tricks to feed a drug habit, she’s not going to stop because of the law. And if the punters now feel they want to avoid the old haunting grounds and stay away from CCTV cameras and the watchful eye of authorities, well, that’s where they’ll go too.

In the UK the anecdotal and limited studies suggest this: the best way for Prostitutes to keep themselves safe is to work inside. Parlours not only have lower rates of violence but suffer different types (no more excusable, but easier to deal with). But the Swedish law specifically prohibits women working inside and organising themselves into groups, because this is considered to be running a brothel or pimping. This stroke of genius is one of the big reason sex workers unions and organisations oppose it. It helps trafficking prosecutions but hurts the native hookers, so what you gain on the swings you lose on the roundabouts.

Where I think the Swedish law does go right is in mandating assistance to those who want to get out, which is why I don’t think the figures are entirely incorrect, although I’d be astounded if they weren’t out by 50% or more. However, my big problem with it is that it treats hooking in the exact same way that you do (no doubt why you approve of it and most hookers disapprove), which is to see it as a moral ill in and of itself, and to give an absurd weight to street hooking at the expense of the more regular kind, the truly invisible hookers who never get asked to take part in surveys because people who do surveys have to ask freelancers individually and that’s all kinds of hard work. People know about streetwalkers, and they know about high class call girls, and they can more or less work out the deal with parlours, but they have only a vague idea about the reticent middle class of freelancers who are a bit more difficult to get hold of because they’re not clumped together. If you check the research they all go to drop in centres, parlours, agencies, but never seem to have the money to scour the internet searching for every freelancer’s website and send them an individual email.

There are good things about Sweden’s approach. There are also massive flaws. If it were implemented as is over here it would massively inconvenience a significant minority (at least) of working girls who work in parlours, potentially converting huge numbers of “happy hookers” into “unhappy hookers” without necessarily converting them into “not hookers”. That’s something I’d rather avoid.

Thanks for the correction. You can just substitute Inara from Firefly for the hetaira in my example, then.

You said this:

If you think girls working in brothels can’t say no, then you’re talking about a minority of brothels, and you’re talking about sex slavery rather than prostitution. That you think the two are the same speaks volumes about why you can’t understand how people could choose to do something like this.

Sex slavery is, legally, someone being compelled by violence to perform sexual acts for the profit of someone else. A sex slave is someone who can’t say no for fear of violence. What I was talking about is not violence (although that is a factor for a lot of so-called prostitutes, who have pimps and therefore are actually sex slaves), but desperate economic need, that prevents a prostitute from saying no. Call me crazy, but “have sex or you won’t eat” doesn’t seem all that different in practice from “have sex or you’ll get a broken nose.” There are some prostitutes who can turn down clients without drastic economic consequences, but there are far too many who can’t.

And yeah, that’s a problem that we should fix by economic aid to the prostitutes. Where did I say anything otherwise? Oh, that’s right–nowhere.

On the subject of victimhood: I actually agree that most people would find the word “victim” condescending. Which is why I didn’t use it originally. You imputed that word to me. I defended it as technically accurate, but it’s not a word I’d generally use. I would instead say that the average prostitute has been wronged, or has to make choices no one should have to make. It’s great that your prostitute friends don’t feel they’ve had to make those kinds of choices! Good for them, and I wish them joy! But they’re the exception–90% of women in the sex trade want out, and try to get out, and fail, and have been wronged by any reasonable definition of the term. This should be acknowledged and not shoved aside because people are paranoid about implying that the other 10% are “victims” (which they’re not, and I never said they were).

Also, intellectually dishonest statements like this just make you look completely ridiculous:

I went to an Alice Cooper concert with a couple of hookers last year and we didn’t talk about sex work at all. Imagine that! Imagine people doing that sort of thing and it not defining them utterly.

Oh, please. I never said or implied that sex work has to define you utterly, or that sex workers talk about sex work all the time. At most, I implied that figure of the sex worker in our cultural imagination is someone who is defined by her sex work (which it is)–but even that would be reading a lot in to what I was saying. If you want to argue, then make an argument. Don’t put words in my mouth.

You also asked this:

1) You’ve been talking to happy hookers who’ve minimised the suffering? And 2) what agenda is that?

1) Yes. Not in real life, thank goodness, but online–I’ve heard people who claim to be prostitutes who say violence is no big deal, just part of the job, that a prostitute who doesn’t do everything her john asks is a no-fun prude, and even that prostitutes who claim to have suffered violence are lying. Of course, these people might not have even been prostitutes, but I had no real reason to disbelieve them.

2) An agenda that wants, for whatever reason, to popularize a rosy picture of prostitution.

You don’t think that targeting something in one part of society without addressing underlying root causes can just move the problem out of sight of those looking and measuring?

Of course I do, but I really don’t think Sweden is failing to address “underlying root causes” of prostitution. I could buy that argument for America or even Canada or Britain, but not Sweden. Is it possible that there’s some hidden mass of prostitutes not visible to the researchers’ eye? Sure, but it’s also possible that there are aliens in Sweden. There’s just no reason to think it. Besides, the issue for me (and for the policy makers) is violence–and violence is harder to hide from people who are looking than sex.

As for your argument that people who think of sex as different from other activities (no, not “super magical”–please get over yourself and stop turning everything I say into a straw man) won’t choose prostitution as a career–I agree. But I don’t think most prostitutes have “chosen prostitution as a career.” As I’ve been saying, I think they’re forced into it by circumstance and do not have other realistic options. This does not mean I want to lock a prostitute up for her own good. It means I want to lock her pimp up, and maybe have some sort of legal sanction for her johns, and give her more choices.

A Greek hetaira–in high demand not just for sex but also for companionship, artistic abilities, conversational talents, social skills, etc.–would easily be able to decline a client who wanted her to do something she found deeply repugnant

No, you don’t know this. You think this.

No, I know this. Because I talk to prostitutes who have reactions from “they’re wrong but their hearts are in the right place” to “what the fuck are these interfering busybodies talking about?” I mean, frankly, I don’t talk to all prostitutes all the time, and most of the ones I do talk to I’m often not discussing their work, just like we’re not always discussing my work. Amazingly, I went to an Alice Cooper concert with a couple of hookers last year and we didn’t talk about sex work at all. Imagine that! Imagine people doing that sort of thing and it not defining them utterly. And now imagine that this might have something to do with why they might not perceive themselves as victims.

People don’t like the idea that they’re 100% out of control, no, but “victim” does not mean “100% out of control.”

And I’m sure everyone sees it that way and nobody would take umbrage with it based on that semantic disagreement and therefore start thinking you’re full of it. Sure, in some cases there are victims who accept that they’re victims right off the bat. But in a lot of cases the prostitutes who are victimised were victims before they were prostitutes, and for some the prostitution is how they salvaged control of already fucked up life. Don’t paint me as being in favour of these events, I’d far rather that they’d had alternatives available to them, but since they’re there now I’m really not seeing the advantage of wading in with your moralising “you’re a victim” wagon rather than with something that helps them make an alternative choice without adding a shitload of moral garbage. Because, frankly, “you’re a victim boo hoo” isn’t worth a hill of beans if they’re going to reply “yes, I know, but you should have seen how much worse it was before I did this, so unless you can give me an actual way to stop that doesn’t involve, y’know, just stopping, fuck off.”

They are not my allies in so far as they minimize the suffering of the unhappy hookers in order to foster their own political agenda, however.

1) You’ve been talking to happy hookers who’ve minimised the suffering? And 2) what agenda is that?

As for the pages you link to, they don’t have numbers, they don’t have research, and they don’t have facts.

Amazingly, no, groups of hookers can often find it very hard to arrange scientific studies. They just have their own experiences. As hookers. It’s that last little bit that makes the difference.

But I find the existence of this black box to be extremely implausible.

You don’t think that targeting something in one part of society without addressing underlying root causes can just move the problem out of sight of those looking and measuring?

It also would not account for why studies consistently show such high rates of violence, drug addiction controlled by pimps and other such abuses among prostitutes: why on earth would drug addicted prostitutes be more likely to talk to a researcher than non-drug addicted ones? Why on earth would prostitutes who get regularly beaten by pimps be more likely to talk to a researcher, given that it’s probably dangerous for her to do so?

Studies about rates of violence within prostitution in general != studies done to see whether the Swedish model reduces the number of prostitutes in Sweden. I don’t think it’s possible to stress enough that you’re responding to a point that’s not even on the same planet as the one I made.

I am arguing that most people would find it deeply violating and scarring to be prostitutes because of how we think of sex.

And most of those people don’t pick prostitution as a career choice, just as vegetarians rarely work at McDonalds flipping beefburgers. Let’s assume that there is a continuum. There are people who think like you do that sex is all super magical and totally tied up with your idea of self worth and that doing something sexual that you don’t want to do is pretty much the worst thing you can think of. If someone like that ends up working as a prostitute, then sure, we can be pretty certain that there’s a lot of coercion and desperation involved. And I don’t think that’s rare enough to not be a huge concern, although it’s rarer in the west (I’d argue) than it is in, say, South Africa or India, because poverty is a huge factor in making someone that desperate and, absent external factors like drugs, most western women who find the notion abhorrent can find something else. The minority who can’t are a problem, but the reason they’re not more is to do with the options they have available in the economy. As I said in the last comment, if the choices are “starving to death or hooking” then it’s not helpful to take away that last option. Nor is it especially helpful to point out that the second option is probably especially unpleasant for the girl involved. No fucking shit, Sherlock, ya think? Now we’ve established over the course of 400 fucking comments, repeatedly and incessantly, that girls who end up doing it for this kind of reason are probably having a real shitty time of it, maybe practical ideas about how to enable them to not do it are in order. Otherwise it’s just so much fucking think of the children blather.

But as with most things, there is a continuum. Not everyone has the same conception of sex that you do. Some people can very easily compartmentalise sex, and for others the money is perfectly adequate compensation for their psyches. And I think it’s fairly safe to assume that the venn diagram of women who could choose something else but who instead put up a website and register with a bunch of escort agencies are trending towards the latter end of the spectrum. If they weren’t, they’d think “eww, prostitution, no thanks.” Again if there’s coercion there that goes out of the window, but I’m pretty sure escort agencies don’t coerce people to join them.

Treating all prostitutes like they’re drug addicted street whores is insulting, if nothing else. If “in general” includes very distinct categories of people with dissimilar stories and “a minority” is between 30% and 80%, depending on how you draw your lines and whether you count parlours (which is tricky, as there is both some movement between parlours and the street, and a deep resentment among some girls who work in parlours towards the “dirty” whores who let the side down), then I think you maybe have to reassess quite how much you are able to dismiss their input. Even assuming all girls in parlours are coerced, even though 100% of all girls I know who work or worked in parlours (which is a statistically insignificant sample of all girls who work in parlours but, y’know, you can do a T test and work out a confidence interval) weren’t, the “minority” you talk about are still around 30% of the total. That’s, y’know, the percentage of Americans who voted for Gore in 2000. I think we should listen to them if they say they’re not victimised, drug addicted street whores, and that they just want to be let alone to do a job they chose to do, and no thank you I wouldn’t like any sanctimonious counselling about how terrible it is.

The capacity to say no is important as a prostitute, of course it is, and most can and do have that option, especially in brothels and massage parlours. You honestly think that a punter walking into a brothel gets to pick any girl of his choice and that she doesn’t get to say “nope, don’t like the look of you?”

Incidentally, if you have a glut of teenage, skilless mothers who will genuinely starve unless they sell their body, I would suggest that this is not, actually, a prostitution problem. In fact, even though prostitution in this case is a bad thing it would seem to me that it’s still better than starving to death, so taking away that option would kinda reduce the options from “prostitution or starving to death” to “starving to death.” So wouldn’t the solution to the problem seem to be, rather than fiddling around with peculiarities of whether or not to arrest the punters or the hookers or both, be to arrest her pimp for drug dealing and give her the financial wherewithal to choose to not stand on that street corner in the first place? I mean, I know it’s fucking radical and everything, but perhaps it really is the economy, stupid.

A Greek hetaira–in high demand not just for sex but also for companionship, artistic abilities, conversational talents, social skills, etc.–would easily be able to decline a client who wanted her to do something she found deeply repugnant. If she said no to him, she wouldn’t be risking her future meals, clothes, shelter, etc. Not only does she have economic power, but she also is unlikely to be in a situation where it’s easy for him to use violence to force her to do what he wants. And if she wanted to leave off having sex for money entirely, she could do that as well. Her well-being would not be threatened.

A teenaged mother walking the streets or even in a brothel has no such options. Besides the issue of violence and pimp-controlled drug addiction, if she says no to a client–even if what he wants terrifies her–she might not physically survive. She could starve. Her baby could starve. She could be without shelter. Etc. And if she wanted to leave prostitution completely, she doesn’t really have that option either–she probably doesn’t have other skills or access to other livelihoods, especially not those that pay enough to pay the rent. Saying no to a client becomes a matter of survival for her in that situation.

In a minority of cases that assumption will be wrong. Great! Good for those people. But again, minorities shouldn’t dictate how we look at things in general.

I just think you’re creating a huge false dichotomy, where one can either do something for the cash or for the fun and never the twain shall meet, and that’s at odds with people’s experience in their daily lives.

1) It’s not “for cash or for fun,” it’s for survival or for fun, and

2) It’s really not a false dichotomy when it comes to sex. Because, yes, sex is different from stacking books or frying burgers for most people. This is partly because of millenia of cultural construction and probably also part biological. And by “different” I don’t mean “shameful.” I mean “personal” in the sense that it would be emotionally scarring to have to cater to someone else’s sexual pleasure and desires, while placing a far lesser value on your own (which prostitutes have to do), for a living. We don’t feel this way about other jobs, for the most part: burger-fryers don’t feel scarred because they have to fry the burgers their employer’s way and not their own way or else get fired.

Some rare individuals who are deeply passionate about their professions maybe feel this way. Some artists and some lawyers would consider it a real violation to paint something that compromises their artistic principles or take a case that seems sordid for the case. And when they feel this way, the term they often use to describe that violation is “whoring” (a usage I don’t appreciate, but I think it’s worth thinking about why it’s common). I’ve heard some public interest lawyers, for instance, say they won’t “whore themselves out” to BigLaw for survival because they don’t want to subordinate their own personal sense of justice for cash. They use the term “whore” (and not some other stigmatized occupation) because they’re describing something they think is analogous to prostitution: the compromise of something important to their identity and integrity. A prostitute performs sexual acts to please the person who’s paying her, not for her own sake; a BigLaw lawyer takes cases in accordance with his employer’s judgments and not his own conscience. Sex is the standard, in most people’s minds, for an area of life where your actions should be dictated by your own desires and values and not by those of the person who’s paying you. I don’t think this is “stigma,” although I don’t deny that stigma exists (how could I?). I think it’s part of how we as a society draw the boundaries between the personal and the public. Money is in the public, commercial realm; sex is in the personal.

Does every single individual on the planet feel this way about sex? Probably not. Probably there are some people who can look at sex as being just like burger-frying. but the vast majority of people do, and the exceptions should not be the default subject of discussion. I am not, just in case someone decides to wildly misinterpret me, saying we should arrest prostitutes because we think they probably don’t want to be prostitutes. I’m saying that because of the way sex has been conceptualized culturally and affects us biologically (and affects women in terms of personal safety, but that’s another issue), we can’t think of prostitution as Just Another Job.