In the comments the other day, I suggested that legalization of prostitution would be an argument I’d entertain if I was convinced that a legalization scheme was concocted with the improvement of the lives of prostitutes in mind. Thanks to Nicholas Kristof for stepping in and shining some light on the subject. Romanticizers of prostitution will not be pleased with the facts, so maybe you should just skip over this if your illusions are important to you:
One response would be: Prostitution is inevitable, so we might as well legalize and regulate it. That’s a pragmatic argument that I used to find persuasive. If brothels were legalized and inspected, I believed, then we could uproot child prostitution and reduce AIDS and sexually transmitted infections.
I changed my mind after looking at the experiences of other countries. The Netherlands formally adopted the legalization model in 2000, and there were modest public health benefits for the licensed prostitutes. But legalization nurtured a large sex industry and criminal gangs that trafficked underage girls, and so trafficking, violence and child prostitution flourished rather than dying out.
As a result, the Netherlands is now backtracking on its legalization model by closing some brothels, and other countries, like Bulgaria, are backing away from that approach.
In contrast, Sweden experimented in 1999 with a radically different approach that many now regard as much more successful: it decriminalized the sale of sex but made it a crime to buy sex. In effect, the policy was to arrest customers, but not the prostitutes.
Some Swedish prostitutes have complained that the policy reduced demand and thus lowered prices, while forcing sex work underground. But the evidence is strong that the new approach reduced trafficking in Sweden, and opinion polls show that Swedes regard the experiment as a considerable success. And the bottom line is that if you want to rape a 13-year-old girl imported from Eastern Europe, you’ll have a much easier time in Amsterdam than in Stockholm.
I propose that the problem with prostitution is unique not because sex as a service is unique exactly. I think that the problem with legalization schemes is that prostitution is more, for the majority of the customers, about buying the opportunity to treat a woman like utter trash. In order for prostitution to be legal and yet still viable, the scheme either has to preserve the customer’s right to treat the prostitute like trash (which is why it works in Nevada, though it does the actual prostitutes little good), or an illegal side market of prostitution will flourish next to the legal one. In other words, if you have to be nice to the legal whores, a lot of johns will go to the illegal ones. Which is probably why Amsterdam got more, not less, child prostitution and trafficking when they legalized prostitution.
That’s why arguments about buying hamburgers, etc. are beside the point. I mean, it’s offensive to compare a person to a hamburger, but it’s also a distraction from the real issue. Prostitution is a unique labor market. Most labor markets, the value of the labor can be separated in some sense from the mistreatment of the workers. You hire someone to make widgets, and the struggles are over benefits, safety standards, etc., but at no point do the workers and the bosses struggle over whether or not widgets are to be made. But when degradation and harm are the work itself, struggling over labor standards becomes confusing.
Which is why I tear my hair out at the people who focus on the exceptions, like Kerry Howley arguing that prostitution is about women who love sex so much they want to make it a career. That sort of argument serves only one purpose—to shame people with serious questions about prostitution into not asking those questions for fear we’ll be labeled as prudes. Well, I’m not taking the bait. I love sex, but that doesn’t mean I’m willing to stand shivering in the rain in a tattered miniskirt dispensing blow jobs to assholes for $10 a pop, like the prostitutes in my old neighborhood would do. There’s probably a few high class hookers that fit the “love sex so much I do it for a career” model, and probably even more that are just really good looking women who figure it’s easy cash, even if they don’t have any illusions that it’s a great time having sex with the kind of assholes who pay for it. But even for argument’s sake, there’s a handful of women that have managed to scratch out a living charging guys for having the share and share alike sex that people who actually love sex tend to have—they’re so very much the exception that the fact that their stories drown out the exponentially more common stories of women who want out or women who don’t like the work, but do like the pay, that I’m suspicious of their place in the debate.
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I’m all for the Swedish approach, with perhaps some of our wasted resources being used to actually enforce international standards against human trafficking. I think everyone agrees that the only senseless thing in the current War on something or other, which is scattershot, props up the very worst of the black market system, and doesn’t even come close to focusing on the well-being of the people in the sex trade.
After all, focusing on criminalizing this particular exchange while living so close to the strip club capital of the world (c’mon Houston, let it be true!) is a little like producing tons of anti-marijuana commercials that are in proximity to beer and liquor commercials.
Fair enough. I definitely think the last thing we need to do is throw prostitutes in jail. They’re either hurting no one or they’re victims. I can see why a lot of sex worker advocates prefer decriminalization to legalization, since the latter, as the post above indicates, is often about making life easier on men who enjoy exploiting women, and does little to help the workers. Decriminalization at least takes the fear of going to jail out of it, while not putting the state’s stamp of approval on a profession where misogyny is the point of it.
It’s been interesting to read commentary on the Spitzer case arguing that johns are rarely prosecuted, therefore Spitzer shouldn’t be prosecuted. My line of thinking has always been that johns are precisely the ones who should be prosecuted, but aren’t because to go after them threatens male privilege. It’s much easier to prosecute the women because demonizing them upholds male privilege. You see a similar dynamic at work with illegal immigration, where the immigrants themselves are demonized while it’s easy for businesses to hire and exploit them without penalty.
I don’t mind the Swedish approach either, and I look at the drug business the same way (albeit reversed): in most cases users shouldn’t have to deal with criminal charges. Distributers and producers, on the other hand…
Responsibility for the powerless, and benefits for the powerful. That’s the usual way these things work.
It isn’t just that. One other reason is that it’s easier to catch hookers than johns. Hookers, by the nature of the profession, have to advertise. Johns don’t. So if you want to round up the usual suspects for some publicity about doing something about prostitution, the sellers are a hell of a lot easier to find and identify than the customers.
If you’re doing a sting operation, same deal. An undercover cop posing as a hooker has to compete with the real hookers (and, of course, you have to have a cop willing to go undercover as a streetwalker), you pretty much need constant surveillance for the UC’s protection, so on and so forth.
Posing as a john? Run up to a prostitute, get the offer, they jump in the car, you turn the corner, drop them off with the arrest team, repeat.
That’s not to say johns get more sympathy from the authorities, because only an idiot would claim otherwise, but there are legitimate reasons why its easier to arrest hookers.
Sorry, that last sentence should read “…not that johns don’t get more sympathy…”
I’ve corresponded with two women who fit the “liked it so much I decided to make a career of it” model. Neither primarily did PIV sex work. Both quit. One said she found she couldn’t make a living doing only those things she was okay with doing.
When I consider public policy around prostitution, first I think about how many women there are who are not in that narrow top tier with other options; the problem that Herbert pointed out. Then I think that, in that top tier, at least my experience tells me that many will burn out and get out very fast. Then I think about legitimating the male sense of entitlement to rent a body to fuck.
So, I’m a Swedish Model proponent. The women at the top who want that work can work around any ban, and it can only help the women who want to get out that they cannot be criminally charged for the work they did.
Arrgh! Well, I assume people know what I meant to say.
Amanda, I wish you had waited a few hours to post this (though I really like the post). We were so, so close to hitting 400 comments down on the other thread, but I doubt we’ll make it now.
I highly recommend this article:
Prostitution, Trafficking, and Cultural Amnesia:
What We Must Not Know in Order To Keep the
Business of Sexual Exploitation Running Smoothly
by Melissa Farley
It’s very readable, full of stats on the backgrounds of people who enter prostitution, and points to possible solutions like Sweden’s. It tranformed my understanding of these issues!
It’s from the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, 2006.
Keith, brothels get busted all the time, and those investigations are resource-intensive as they put an undercover inside a hostile building and require a raid team as well as surveillance. Meanwhile the mere fact that an officer posing as a prostitute needs to compete with prostitutes for clients does not mean that they can’t get plenty of johns. The real issue is that (1) law enforecement and prosecutors are sometimes more sympathetic to the johns and their families than the sex workers — especially cops, who so often abuse and rape sex workers; and (2) even if they were not, juries are more sympathetic to the johns, making the cases more likely to try and tougher to win. So the johns either get easy pleas, or ignored in favor of the slut-shaming worker prosecution.
As with almost all feminist issues in criminal justice, the technical system is secondary to the society as expressed through the system in the attitudes of law enforcement, prosecutors, judges and jurors. Real change is most available by changing the world the system operates in. We as a society have to see johns as the real criminals and sex workers as in a tough situation before the system will work that way.
I highly recommend this article:
Prostitution, Trafficking, and Cultural Amnesia:
What We Must Not Know in Order To Keep the
Business of Sexual Exploitation Running Smoothly
by Melissa Farley
It’s very readable, full of stats on the backgrounds of people who enter prostitution, and points to possible solutions like Sweden’s. It tranformed my understanding of these issues!
It’s from the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, 2006.
Amanda,
What about a joint legalize, regulate and decriminalize approach? Hypothetically, if we could create a system where legal sex work would occur where there are rules that protect sex workers and provide them with tangible benefits like:
1. The sex workers involved are definitely over 18;
2. The doors are never locked;
3. The sex workers involved are given access to health care, job training and placement assistance, and educational resources;
4. The sex workers cannot be required to perform any service;
5. The sex workers involved can unionize;
6. The police are required to respond to complaints by sex workers; and most importantly
7. If you seek (not provide, but seek) sexual services outside the legal industry we throw your ass in jail for 6 months.
I recognize that we have a doctrinal difference of opinion. But I don’t think that means that no one who supports legalization does so without the improvement of the lives of prostitutes in mind.
Heh, well, if the thread is as much a lost cause as I suspect, it will continue to rage.
Perhaps for every failed law-enforcement initiative that involves commercial transactions:
prostitution
immigration control
the ‘Drug War’
(others)
…the stress should be shifted from one set of ‘perps’, one side of the transaction, to the other for more satisfactory results.
It’s never made (surface) sense to me busting illegal immigrant workers, when the farmer/boss was such an easier target. (Of course, the PTB aren’t actually SERIOUS about stopping that flow, they just want to cow the poor immigrants while the guys w/the money reap the benefits.)
I’m not sure I trust Kristof’s summary of the Netherlands. However, it is wrong to think any regulatory scheme will pick out all the problems that will arise as the result of it. Regulations have to adapt to circumstances. Kristof doesn’t say that the Netherlands is going back to criminalizing prostitution, or even decriminalizing - which one would expect if it were a massive failure. In contrast, he says merely that the Swedes are happy with their program - but I have a hard time believing they don’t have to deal with bad brothels and gangs as well. There’s no magic wand - there’s only constant adjustment. Either way, it would be a better system than the one that is in place in the U.S.
It is a libertarian wet dream to think, oh, let’s have legalization without regulation. That simply doesn’t work - as the financial markets have amply proven, recently.
I do think that if prostitution were legalized, it would have to be under the auspices of some kind of guild system - a sort of prostitutes AMA - for it to work.
And Amanda, don’t you find it rather irritating that the driver of this discussion is the resignation of that dickhead, Spitzer, than, say, the slaughter of seven prostitutes in Houston in November of last year, or the insane persecution of the D.C. Madame? I do.
The more I think about it, the more I think keeping it illegal to buy sex while making it legal to sell shifts the power dynamic in a way that helps compensate for the general misogyny of our culture. If the johns are the ones with something to fear, maybe they have an extra incentive to be respectful.
I also wonder if the reduced demand stems from the shift in that power dynamic. It’s less appealing to those men who want to own and degrade someone. If that segment of the customer base is smaller, that would be a good thing.
“I think that the problem with legalization schemes is that prostitution is more, for the majority of the customers, about buying the opportunity to treat a woman like utter trash.”
can’t draw that argument. Otherwise, since prostitution occurs everywhere, one has to conclude “a lot of women like being threated like trash”. Pretty absurd like?
I tend to think everybody makes rational economic decision. (ie. given all available options, an individiual think prostitution gives the optimal return. This include assuming all sort of risks. That on balance the return is good enough over the rist to continue the activities.)
btw. Kristoff mad some of the most idiotic foreign reportage I’ve ever read (NK, ID, IN, balkan.) That guy should be fired. (he also lied about Iraq war, btw. )
effing eyehole. I do not trust his writing period. (I cannot help but as, what’s his game, who is pulling string, etc)
I was always vaguely in favour of decriminalization of sex work until a long conversation I had with my brother in law. He is a police officer who worked for a while in “vice” and saw much of the way the system worked in action. He tended to work with street prostitutes, most of whom were once “higher-class call girls” (that is, those who work in hotels or homes) but got too old and ended up on the streets. He made a couple of points that really made me reconsider my stance on the issue:
1) And I’ve heard this one recently on blogs as well, those who want to regulate the industry tend to want to do so for the benefits of the johns, not the sex workers. And that’s how legalization and regulation generally play out: giving the johns and the pimps more power. It’s the johns that benefit from prostitution being out in the open, the pimps that benefit from the women having to register so their whereabouts can be tracked, the madams that benefit from sex work being restricted to brothels. Even the health regulations tend to be put in place in order to ensure those icky whores don’t pass on diseases to our fine upstanding male citizens.
2) Just because something has always happened and always will is a stupid reason to decriminalize it. My brother-in-law’s analogy is domestic violence, which has been around forever, will probably always be around, but is still wrong and therefore illegal. He pointed out that we’ve made great strides both in the legal and the social spheres in the last few decades, and decreased the incidence of domestic violence. Now prostitution is less objectively wrong, imo, but I still think the point stands.
I think I like the Swedish model the best. My brother-in-law also disagrees with that model, because he says the only women (and there are very few) he has seen leave the streets to start new lives used being arrested as a catalyst. I think there are better ways to help sex workers than law enforcement, but it requires social workers, not cops, to be the ones to interact with them on a daily basis.
One thing we definitely agreed on is that we have to work to make the usage of prostitution socially unacceptable. A lot of jurisdictions have had success with John schools, where men who have been caught buying can learn about the horrible conditions that lead women into sex work, and about the scars it leaves. Too many men actually delude themselves into thinking that using a prostitute is some kind of altruism. John school has a much lower recidivism rate than the justice system, at a lower cost.
“a lot of women like being threated like trash”. Pretty absurd like?
When you comprehend this truth, Grasshopper, you will begin the path to enlightenment.
Yeah yeah yeah–reminds me of the other co-libertarian, semi-economic rationales offered for, say, drug legalization, with the usual side result being:
1) Government lies when it says the revenue base would be great….
2) in the same breath the revenue base argument and legalization of dope is to help eliminate drug dependency…. Hmm
3) No one deigns to mention that in some segments of Amsterdam you can’t sit down in the park for all the damned needles lying around. Quite literally gone to pot.
People mention that Dad has his liquor and mom likes her cigarettes, but we all know the cat was well out of the bag on those issues long ago with little chance of banning them outright,–just making smokers stand outside at the most. The inverse of this is that we all know that had we known THEN what we know now, cigarettes and booze would have been nixed long ago.
It IS kinda a funny this retro reversion to the older feminist thinking on the topic. Some think prostitution is not only the oldest professino but the noblest, and it fosters “economic control” of female’s own bodily resources. Others think it a scam and an exploitation that if legalized would harm little doe-eyed school girls barely old enough to shave their moo-moos. Female empowerment? Or exploitation? Maybe the older madams are not getting royally screwed anymore economically since some of them drive Porsches?
Have yet to see any reference of how prostitution harms the society overall. Though no doubt it does.
One wonders from the Swedish model and similar locales that have high illegitimacy rates and divorce rates 60% over our own and 1/3 of all kids born out of wedlock if promiscuity (probably also admittedly encouraged in no small part by sumptious hand out economic goodies on the backs of others) is that much of a blessing.
Willing to bet Spitzer’s wife would have something to say on this.
OK, but then you’re still doing, at some level, what you decry in advocates for legal prostitution - i.e. tossing out some sex workers’ feelings on the matter as irrelevant in lieu of others’.
You’ve continually spoken here with the unshakable assumption that a person would only ever pay for sex out of a desire to treat a woman (men sell their bodies to men too, y’know) like utter trash. I’ve never paid for sex, and don’t intend to, but I see no reason whatsoever to believe that this is inherent to paying for sex. Those “high class hookers” which you acknowledge exist in some numbers wouldn’t be able to find themselves a living at all if this were the case. And if you acknowledge that they can exist, then that claim that “degradation is the work itself” falls flat.
And thus it doesn’t seem absurd that there could be a model for permitting legal purchase of sex - from providers, probably working independently, but with appropriate oversight from authorities in the name of security and health. People who wanted the exploitative sex you declare the norm would probably seek illegal prostitution outside of that model, and prosecuting people for buying sex in that fashion would make sense.
I want to add something mythago brought up that I hadn’t thought about before, in adding to my suspicions that legalization is often not about improving conditions for sex workers so much as making exploitation easier for johns. Legalization schemes usually involve having prostitutes get licenses under their real names, making it harder for them to get other jobs when they wish to get out. A bit of a back door trap to keep you in the work, but what happens when you get old enough that no one’ll pay you anymore?
BTW, where do some of you live where johns never get prosecuted? There’s been a few busts in my area recently where they nabbed a few dozen men each time via a Craigslist ad.
Dr. Confused: I can think of at least one way legalization would benefit prostitutes over johns: they would no longer have to accept rape and abuse from police officers.
Amanda: Like Ballast (I think), I wonder what evidence you have that “degradation and harm” of prostitutes is so prevalent that it has become the “product” they make and sell.
Is this part of the definition–that a man who pays for sex does this not because he wants sex, but to degrade and harm the sex worker? That is, women who take money for sex have by definition agreed to degradation and self-destruction?
Certainly some men pay for sex to degrade a woman–or at least because paying for sex gives him some control over the act he otherwise would not have. And even if paying prostitutes is like rape in this way, do you think the state should protect women who don’t mind doing this for money by taking away their agency?
Or is this an argument about the structure of society limiting agency for women in a way that makes it impossible for two people to make a prostitution transaction on equal terms?
If so, what about people who pay men for sex. Is this also about degradation and harm? Or does social structure somehow give men more power to exercise their agency by selling sex?
Just asking.
I think that a system similar to what Kristen is proposing above could work if street prostitution was defined as automatically outside the legal system and some sort of professional licensing system for sex workers was set up. In effect, street prostitution would be dealt with under the Swedish model, but it would still be legal to patronize businesses staffed by licensed professional sex workers.
We would also need to make sure that strong worker protections were in place for those businesses. The Nevada system is ridiculous because it restricts the rights of workers way too much. Your employer should never have the right to tell you what to do with your time when you’re “off the clock,” no matter who you work for.
I think I like the Swedish model the best. My brother-in-law also disagrees with that model, because he says the only women (and there are very few) he has seen leave the streets to start new lives used being arrested as a catalyst.
Part of the problem with letting cops arrest hookers is it means the hookers have to have sex with the cops for free to bribe them out of getting arrested. Cops are johns as well, basically. Which seems like a reason to address the issue as a crime for johns, but not prostitutes.
“In other words, if you have to be nice to the legal whores, a lot of johns will go to the illegal ones. Which is probably why Amsterdam got more, not less, child prostitution and trafficking when they legalized prostitution.”
100% correct. In my experience, men seeking prostitutes aren’t “lonely, sad johns” they’re self-obssessed adulteres and/or looking for something . . . shall we say forbidden and risky (to the women, primarily).
If required to go to a prostitute they have to treat well and still pay, they’ll seek out the illegal ones, because if they wanted to treat a woman nicely, they wouldn’t be out searching for a prostitute. Johns know how society views sex workers. They know they can pretty much get away with anything they do to sex workers. *
Decriminalization is the only thing that’s going to help the workers, imo.
*- I left out “high class call girls” because in the last 15+ years, I’ve met exactly four of them and all of them got out of the business after only a year or two. So, I haven’t the background data to make even assumptions about their treatment by johns.
i.e. tossing out some sex workers’ feelings on the matter as irrelevant in lieu of others’.
I’m not tossing out some in favor of others. I’m questioning why the vanishingly small minority of prostitutes should have exponentially larger voices that the vast majority. Answer: because they’re telling a lot of men what they want to hear.
You’ve continually spoken here with the unshakable assumption that a person would only ever pay for sex out of a desire to treat a woman (men sell their bodies to men too, y’know) like utter trash.
Oh, no, I admit that the Sad Unfuckable John does exist. But again, the stereotype that applies to 1% of customers is being utilized as a stand-in for the rest, who are more like Eliot Spitzer, who enjoys fucking and throwing prostitutes in jail. I will never say never. I just question the motives of people who focus on a teeny-tiny percentage of the transactions (sad unfuckable men getting the rare opportunity to have sex, because they paid for it from the hooker with a heart of gold) at the expense of talking about the vast majority of transactions, which are massive assholes who enjoy the feeling of having control over a woman they can treat however they like.
It’s like the anti-choicers who focus on late term abortions, and largely the mythological ones where a woman waltzes in the day before delivery to get an abortion because she changed her mind.
Interestingly, the idea that most prostitution is altruistic only comes up in these discussions. The rest of the time, people seem to accept that the “smack my bitch up” model is the dominant one.
For all those in favor of legalized prostitution: HOW problematical must an industry be before being banned? While the theoretical, utopian vision of prostitution may be superficially attractive, the way it actually plays out is so repugnant and so damaging to so many that I feel it continues to be necessary to outright ban it.
It’s the nuclear power of social structures. Great in theory.
If prostitution goes the decriminalization perhaps sex workers who are being abused by pimps and johns would feel more comfortable with coming forward and reporting the abuse. Then again, so many victims of abuse find it hard to come get the help they need and deserve. This is a difficult issue. I was wondering since this issue parallels the porn industry, since porn is more in the open these days has it been harder or easier to find the people involved in child pornography? Just a thought.
Answer: because they’re telling a lot of men what they want to hear.
And because they are privileged; often educated and often white; in a society that dramatically overrepresents the voice of privileged educated white women over poor women and women of color, and that dramatically overrepresents ceteris paribus the voices of men over women.
A nasty story in my town from a few years back: A group of cops were doing a prostitution sting. To keep it interesting, the cops had a competition going as to who could argue the woman down to the lowest price before busting them. It seems they didn’t actually have sex with the women, just humiliated them for their own amusement. I believe the lowest they got was one women who eventually was brow-beat into agreeing to $8 for PIV.
I remember once when bored with my ex-boyfriend, we were reading some forums, and for a laugh, someone posted a website where johns compared notes on various prostitutes. Being naive, I clicked over, having no idea what it would be like. Yeah, it wasn’t funny. Not too many sad, unfuckable johns. Mostly guys one upping each other with stories about who could get the prostitutes to do increasingly degrading things, how funny it is when you’re choking someone with your cock and she’s crying but has to keep going because you’re paying her, and stories about talking street walkers down from $7 for a blow job to $5. I think, prior to that, I really wanted to believe better about men who visited prostitutes. I’m an eternal optimist. But once in awhile, you have to accept that people have this dark side.
I have to admit, I think you’re right, in a sense. I don’t think people hire prostitutes so they can treat someone like trash, but I think once they do, they feel that they have rights to do what they want… which ends up amounting to the same thing.
It’s the same as the old crap about “I bought dinner and paid for the show, now you owe me something in return”, only he don’t actually have to pretend to be a decent human being during dinner and the show.
On the other hand, anti-prostitution laws end up harming the prostitute more than the customer, and I don’t like that.
And I also don’t like it when people can get into trouble for stuff that shouldn’t really be illegal.
Since domestic violence occurs everywhere, one has to conclude a lot of women like domestic violence.
Since rape occurs everywhere, one has to conclude a lot of women like being raped.
Since women earn less than men everywhere, one has to conclude a lot of women like earning less than men.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
“Being naive, I clicked over, having no idea what it would be like. Yeah, it wasn’t funny. ”
That’s only the tip of the iceburg. Help the cops fish a few women out of dumpster and you get to see just how much men truly do hate women.
Some canadian data (the number is old, but it gives some picture. There is also german reports. If you can read german)
http://24.85.225.7/lowman_prostitution/ProLaw/prolawcan.htm
Prostitution Law Reform in Canada
John Lowman, School of Criminology, Simon Fraser University To be published in an anthology celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Institute of Comparative Law in Japan, Chuo University. Edited by T. Shiibashi, forthcoming
This paper is a follow-up to an article on Canadian prostitution law published in the Comparative Law Review (Lowman, 1989a) that described the events leading up to the enactment in December 1985 of a new street prostitution control measure which prohibits communicating in a public place for the purpose of buying or selling sexual services. The paper concluded that the communicating law did not have the salutary effect its designers promised because they misdiagnosed the problems they were trying to solve.
With an additional eight years experience of the communicating law since that paper was written, and with the experience of two other new laws section 212(2), a separate offence for persons procuring or living on the avails of a person under 18 years of age; and section 212(4) which prohibits attempting to purchase or purchasing sex from persons under 18 this paper examines the way various interest groups have influenced prostitution law reform, and how those reforms have played out in law enforcement practice. I suggest that far from resolving the dilemmas facing Canadian legislators in the 1980s, the communicating law has made street prostitution more dangerous, and made the hypocrisy underlying the Canadian approach to regulating prostitution all the more problematic.
since prostitution occurs everywhere, one has to conclude “a lot of women like being threated like trash”. Pretty absurd like?
You know, you could read the link. But even if you don’t want to, here’s the relevant answer to the inquiry:
The irony is that the sad, unfuckable john myth always puts him in the room with a high class call girl. As a rule, these women cost a lot of money, and the guys who can shell it out aren’t likely to be such social misfits that they can’t get laid. Maybe a few really nerdy engineers? Or in some countries where respectable women are kept locked up, we’re seeing a flourishing sex trade that’s as much about sexual satisfaction as sadistic impulses. But on the whole, men who can lay down $3,000 a pop for sex aren’t the kind of guys that are elbowed out of the normal casual sex and dating world.
Here’s a more sceptical look at the than Kristof’s - and by the way, it is easy to see, through Google, that the Swedes have certainly not eliminated gangs dealing in prostitution.
After posting above, I realized that people might not get where I was going.
“a lot of women like being threated like trash”. Pretty absurd like?
Yes, that is absurd. And yet everywhere, a lot of women are being treated like trash. Women are raped, beaten and killed by intimate partners, humiliated and excluded in sexualized work environments … and yet it is absurd to suggest that they all just like being badly mistreated.
It’s almost as if there were some powerful force; some pervasive social structure that subjugates women and forces them into terribly vulnerable positions, that convinces men that it is okay or even necessary to treat them like trash …
Understand that.
Amen, Keith. I’m not a cop, but my department works closely with them at times. I can tell you that if misogyny is as endemic to the ranks of my city’s police force as it is to the fire department (which is where I work), then I wouldn’t expect cops to ever be as harsh with johns as they are with prostitutes.
For a more sceptical look at the Swedish model than Kristof’s, see this article:
http://www.thelocal.se/9621/20080110/.
As for Kristof’s idea that the Netherlands fights a problem with gangs prostituting women that the Swedes have solved, well, just Google Sweden brothel gangs and you will find that - as one expects, given the flood of prostitutes from Eastern Europe in the last fifteen years - that isn’t true.
Which is the problem with Kristof in a nutshell. The guy is a cherrypicker.
Thomas, TSID March 13, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Yes, that is absurd. And yet everywhere,”
you can propose it’s the patriarchy model. I for one more going along the line of basic “money-crime” model.
You can buy anybody and make that person do anything with enough “incentives”. Take out the ‘incentives and provide alternative, a rational actor will chose something else.
making it criminal is one way of doing it (creating expensive barrier of entry) but unfortunately, it only make the transaction and commodity that much more valuable.
Now, let’s say (I know nobody like how I say it, but it’s the easiest way) suppose the environment is changed so that the transaction becomes commodity. (ie. low risk, but very low return since just about anybody can do it. )
Now combined with penalty for johns,
logically, the economy simply is not there anymore. Why becomes prostitutes if there is other easier money?
(of course I feel there is a whole in my view somewhere, but somebody figures it out…
Here are some excerpts from a great (trigger warning) article about Melissa Farley’s work in Nevada:
From a brothel prostitute:
“No one really enjoys getting sold,” says Angie, who Farley interviewed. “It’s like you sign a contract to be raped.”
And, regarding the prevalence of illegal prostitution, despite legal prostitution:
Meanwhile, illegal brothels are on the increase in Nevada, as they are in other parts of the world where brothels are legalised. Nevada’s illegal prostitution industry is already nine times greater than the state’s legal brothels. “Legalising this industry does not result in the closing down of illegal sex establishments,” says Farley, “it merely gives them further permission to exist.”
Here’s the link. Read it all.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/sep/07/usa.gender
PS. don’t make me read Kristoff. I get ugly.
Melissa Farley has questionable methods, some of which this review discusses a bit.
Squashed, how does your stated assumption of rational economic actors explain men who kill their children, their estranged (escaped) wives, and themselves?
Again, it’s almost as if some powerful cultural current is guiding them, unseen …
I’m not sure Melissa Farley is exactly an unbiased social science researcher.
And even if her 89% statistic accurately reflects the state of prostitution in the real world, this may have something to do with prohibition.
Besides, 87% of Americans would change jobs if they could. This says nothing about the depth of dissatisfaction–20 year old hookers with six years of experience probably hate their jobs more than the Wal-Mart manager–but it suggests we need more than just a percentage to figure out what is really going on.
The review only challenges the Nevada book, stating that is not solid scientific research. I still stand behind the quotes from it I provided. The review does not challenge her other articles.
RSS,
What about the 67% PTSD rate, the fact that the most common cause of death is murder, and the high rates of depression and attempted suicide?
Interesting that 80% of the prostitutes in a legal brothel want out but don’t know how to get out. Not that big a difference from the 89% number under the illegal model that encompasses so many street walkers.
Yes, ballast. Anything to maintain the illusion.
No, but many of her more notable articles were apparently not subject to any peer review process. I’m not an expert on sex work, but as an academic, these things do not reassure me.
Amanda, why are you inserting material related to patently illegal prostitution into this debate (Farley)? No one - *No one* - has ever argued that streetwalking or coercing anyone into prostitution should be legal.
Roger, that article is just as much cherry-picking, only more so.
It seems that she has 25 peer-reviewed articles to her name. If the shorter articles (which I can actually access) on Psychiatric Times are based on those articles, I don’t see the problem.
Oh, how I miss my university days with all the freeee online journals.
Caitlain, because I think that prostitution tends to only exist under structures where the prostitutes can be treated like they’re subhuman, because the thrill for the johns and the pimps is to control the women. Legalizing prostitution doesn’t get rid of illegal prostitution, unless the legal prostitution structure retains the aspects of the illegal prostitution structure that appeal to johns—the ability to be cruel to the prostitutes. If worker safety standards are introduced that make the job more pleasant, the johns will go elsewhere.
But I did also point out that the prostitutes working in the supposed fairyland of legal Nevada brothels have similar “get me the fuck out” percentages as illegal prostitutes.
Bless the woman, she posted her peer-reviewed articles for free online:
http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/c-prostitution-research.html
One BIG problem with the idea of legalizing and “regulating” prostitution is that johns don’t want to participate in a regulated transaction.
The illegal market would continue to thrive for at least two main reasons. The first is the reason Amanda suggests: because many men who use prostitutes want to control, exploit, and abuse another person (male or female), and satisfying that desire would become a lot more expensive in any system that included effective protection for prostitutes. So men motivated in that way would still rely on illegal prostitutes.
Another reason the illegal market would persist is that even those who just wanted sex (there are probably plenty of johns who chiefly have this goal) would prefer an illegal transaction because they were more certain it would be anonymous, so their marriages and careers would be more likely to be affected.
It seems likely that only draconian enforcement aimed at the illegal prostitution trade, making the odds of getting caught buying sex illegally much higher, would make the cost high enough to overcome these benefits, and I don’t think more draconian enforcement is what we want. That’s why a shift like legalizing the selling but not the buying of sexual services seems more practical.
Would it be legal to advertise sexual services for sale?
I suspect that a similar percentage of people who work in a great many jobs would want to get out.
For my honors project for my degree, I’ve spent a lot of time conversing with women who work in the brothels in Nevada (along with a number of stretwalkers and escorts), and the vast majority of them do not feel like they’re being abused, raped, degraded, etc. Sure, several of them would like to find something else to do with their lives at some point, but they are, by and large, not the hell holes that you and many other portray them to be. Anecdotal “evidence” from one or two women who were prostitutes and decry the (brothel) industry hardly make for a compelling expose on what life is like in those places.
Are there problems there? You bet. Most of them could be solved with rational legislation and regulations, however, rather than just doing away with them altogether.
The problems they’ll run into is what to do about getting out when the time comes, Caitlain. If they’re licensed, good luck to them getting another job with that on their records. If they’re not, good luck getting them to convince their pimps that it’s time for another career path. I’m hard-pressed to believe that 89% of people really hate their jobs and urgently want out.
Squashed:
You quoted Amanda saying this:
“I think that the problem with legalization schemes is that prostitution is more, for the majority of the customers, about buying the opportunity to treat a woman like utter trash.”
And you said this in response:
can’t draw that argument. Otherwise, since prostitution occurs everywhere, one has to conclude “a lot of women like being threated like trash”. Pretty absurd like?
Logical disconnect there. Apples and oranges. Why men buy doesn’t have anything to do with why women sell. What men want to buy doesn’t really relate to what women want to sell, and what women want to sell in the context of prostitution only very rarely has anything to do with what they can sell. Just because women will sell it doesn’t mean they like it.
Women making rational economic decisions to become prostitutes (because they have little in the way of options to do something else that will bring in the same cash) does not mean they like it. And it’s simply abuse of rational actor theory (as is so common with any libertarian argument against any “protective” social policy) to assume that if a person really didn’t like what they were doing, or was being damaged by it, she’d simply do something else.
It is entirely consistent with both logic and economic theory to say men are purchasing the ability to treat women like shit, and that’s what they get out of it, and simultaneously to say that women do not enjoy selling that opportunity, yet rationally do it anyway in a market in which they don’t have the economic power or the opportunities to do otherwise for more.
Because it is economically rational for a desperate person to do something does not mean she likes it.
I’ve not made up my mind on decriminalization v. legalization, or what the parameters of a workable legalization/regulation plan would or could be. But the romantising of these imaginary hordes of super happy hookers is just ridiculous.
I’d expect a vice cop to have a bit of selection bias here.
so their marriages and careers would be
moreless likely to be affected.pnkrokhockeymom March 13, 2008 at 1:15 pm
Logical disconnect there. Apples and oranges. Why men buy doesn’t have anything to do with why women sell. ”
but it has everything to do with why somebody keeps selling something. Obviously to the seller there is positive return despite the risk.
Ismone: What about them? Can you show that selling sex for money causes them, rather than the social or institutional structure–legal or illegal–under which the transaction takes place? If not, then the solution is to change the structure, not prohibit the activity.
Amanda: Eighty percent of workers at Wal-Mart want to get out but don’t know how.
Something brought many of these women to enter this business voluntarily–as voluntarily as any of us take any job, at least. They exercised agency. I’m not clear on how having the state take this agency away improves the capacity of women to exercise it in other contexts.
You believe that prostitution is about men cruelly abusing women, and you think the state should take from women their power to permit this to happen in return for money. Should the state also force women to end abusive marriages?
Eh, that’s probably the sign of an impasse. I’ll just note that others have brought up criticism of her work as well. Perhaps normal academic skepticism is just about illusion.
PTSD is caused by traumatic events, and the symptoms are reliving those traumatic events after they are triggered. General population rates of PTSD are 5%, PTSD among prostitutes is 67%.
So it cannot be caused by social disapprobation.
Do your homework, first, before throwing out hypothetical questions that the most basic understanding of PTSD.
And I support decriminalization, certainly not legalization. They make those women register and put up pictures of them. They don’t make the john’s register, get tested, or have their pictures splashed on the internet. Inequality, much?
Amanda Marcotte March 13, 2008 at 12:59 pm
… I think that prostitution tends to only exist under structures where the prostitutes can be treated like they’re subhuman, because the thrill for the johns and the pimps is to control the women. Legalizing prostitution doesn’t get rid of illegal prostitution, unless the legal prostitution structure retains the aspects of the illegal prostitution structure that appeal to johns—the ability to be cruel to the prostitutes.”
the point of decriminalization is not to completely erradicate prostitution, but to not make it illegal. So that there is no reason for underground exploitation. A prostitute doesn’t need the protection of crime organisation. It is reduced to simple transaction.
The point to all this: a) reduce homicide b) people doens’t run around the street playing cat and mouse with police and gangster… etc etc… things like that.
that in turn make crime organization unprofitable and bring prostitution into legit public heal and safety policy issue instead of crime problem. You can’t talk about womens dignity while prostitution exist on street level mixing it all with hard crime. (this on top of state database. nasty.)
decriminalization won’t eliminate weird shit. If somebody wants to buy sex slave in black market from the far east. It will still happens.
I don’t disagree with that at all, though if prostitution was legalized, over time, IMO, there’d be less stigma attached to it and it would to some degre because less of an issue.
And where did that “89%” figure come from? Some place other than Farley I hope. Unless I missed it, that’s the only person I’ve seen you cite, and her credibility on this subject is largely nil, at least amongst serious academics. Based on what I’ve seen (which, admittedly, is somewhat limited, but it has been recent), the figure is nowhere near that high for brothel workers or escorts.
I suspect a huge number of nurses would like to find something else to do as well, rather than deal with abusive patients and whatnot. But they do the work because they money is as good as it is and they know that taking another job would lead to a substantial pay decrease.
R. Stanton Scott March 13, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Should the state also force women to end abusive marriages?”
I would say yes. (tho’ we can argue what degree of abuse)
This interview with the prostitute that Spitzer hired is interesting.
It’s worth noting that her going rate of $1,000 an hour puts her deeply into the vanishingly small minority of prostitutes. That’s about 3 times as much as a brothel prostitute in a legal Nevada place would charge (most of that would not go into her pocket, of course), and about 40 times as much as street prostitutes in Chicago make an hour. So what we have here is someone who should be the absolute epitome of the happy hooker who does this work because she just loves sex so much and she’s so good at, right?
Well, doesn’t quite seem to be that way. She’s certainly not hurting, since she can charge so much and doesn’t have to have non-stop sex just for scraps, of course. But according to the profile, she’s really trying to be a musician. She seems to be someone with limited employment opportunities.
And good on her for doing what she has to in order to get by, and it’s hard to fault her for taking on this work when it pays so well and she’s trying to start a small business.
But hardly the happy hooker. And this is the cream of the crop. I find it hard to believe happy hookers are more in abundance if you go down the scale.
i guess i’m just weird. i have this neurotic thing where i’m concerned about my partner 100% doing it because she wants to. if it even seems like her attention wanders a little bit, i’m moved to ask her what’s wrong. so who are these guys who can have sex with somebody transactionally? or coercively? i’ve tried for many years to get inside that mindset, and as you may have guessed, the only way i can access it is by becoming so angry and hateful that i’m able to completely objectify the person i’m fixed on - but the result of that is that i’ve objectified myself as well, and that’s not a place i particularly enjoy being.
There’s a major difference in trying to compare the two and that’s technology: communication technology–well, let’s be honest, the Internet–has made it easier for kiddie porn producers and consumers to find each other, allowing those who have the fetish but previously didn’t have the means to express it to do so. That, however, is a different issue from the acceptance of adult, legal, porn and its somewhat mainstreaming (in that porn stars are recognizable celebrities and recognizable to people who haven’t actually seen porn themselves).
Even if porn weren’t as mainstream and accepted that technological advantage for the still very-much-illegal child porn subculture would still exist
Well, the state provides a lot more assistance to women leaving abusive relationships than they do to prostitutes. Like, sometimes the abusive spouse is prosecuted and the woman is not considered a criminal for “allowing” the abuse to continue in exchange for sustenance.
Why do people have such a hard time accepting that money itself can be a form of coercion? Since we’ve heard all the absurd comparisons of hooking to sandwiches and whatnot, let’s have an extreme example on the other side. Let’s say some eugenically minded group offers all pregnant women below a certain income level $10,000 to have an abortion. The women can say no if they want to. Many undoubtedly will. Some who take the money would have had the abortion anyway, and figure, why not take the money? But can you see, imagine perhaps, that it would be very difficult to sort out whether the women who took the money really wanted to have the abortion, especially if the woman has a very serious need for the money - an aging parent who needs care, other children who need care, signficant debt she needs to get out of, whatever. Can you see how the money actually interferes with the function of free will? Can you see how the motives of the group/person offering the incentive matter? Can you see that in all of these situations that even if the person accepting the money is being a rational actor, their ability to have true, true choice about what they want is greatly impinged upon by the offer of money? Just because money changes hands does not mean the person has not been coerced. What if someone offered you $1 million to have one of your legs amputated? How many of you would be arguing that it’s your right to do with your body what you want and anyone who questions what the hell is wrong with someone that would offer $1 million for your leg must have a horrible opinion of people with disabilities?
In all of the situations, the moral and ethical question falls back on the person offering the money, not the person accepting it. You may consider these examples absurd, but they certainly are not less absurd than comparing working as a prostitute to making sandwiches.
I think its bizarre to argue, as amanda does, that legalizing/decriminalizing and liscencing women as prostitutes constitutes some kind of serious bar to them getting other, regular, jobs when they choose to move on. For one thing when prositution isn’t *illegal* it will cease to have the negative connotations that it does now. For another there is no reason to believe this problem can’t be solved by allowing prostitutes to use “work names” like an actors work name. We are very far from having a total information society in which all your previous jobs must be shown to a prospective employer–or if we are there then not being able to account for the last five years is as big a problem to a prostitute now as it will be when you file your tax returns and show that you paid brothel income (if, indeed, that is revealed by your paperwork.
there are lots of reasons to oppose legalizing or decriminalizing prostitution. I am not opposed to either because I think its to the benefit of the women involved. But fear that legalizing it will make it harder for prostitutes to go on to other trades? Please. People with *criminal records* go on to get hired in some part of the economy. Why would a legal job be ag reater bar to changing jobs/going back to school/starting again than anything else?
aimai
To make it easier, here is a direct link to the study from which the 89% figure was originally taken, although Farley has republished it elsewhere.
http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/pdf/Prostitutionin9Countries.pdf
Be forewarned, it is 8.27 megs.
I do not think there is anything wrong with a peer-reviewed author publishing non-peer-reviewed articles/books, such as the NV book.
If someone can provide a link to a valid (full-text) critique of that study, than I’m your huckleberry.
How does New Zealand compare to Sweden & the Netherlands, in law and in results? Do the latter countries have the equivalent of www.nzpc.org.nz, the New Zealand sex worker organization?
For one thing when prositution isn’t *illegal* it will cease to have the negative connotations that it does now.
Assumes facts not in evidence. Prostitution is legal in six counties of Nevada; how are prostitutes treated by the brothel owners there? Are there any quantitative studies showing that respect for prostitutes increased after legalization anywhere? It sounds like you’re just asserting this as an assumption with no reason to believe it’s true.
Aimai,
I don’t think it is odd. If you have to put it on your tax returns, it is publicly available. If you have your picture on the web, that is humiliating. A lot of legalization schemes have to do with registering, but the johns don’t have to register, as I mentioned upthread.
So I see a problem there as well.
Caitlan and R. Stanton Scott, it’s probably also true that 80% of grad students wish they could quit (I’m a grad student). The difference is that working at Wal-Mart, being a nurse, or being a grad student are all jobs where you have legal rights and legal recourse if you are being abused. They are also jobs where you are selling your labor, time and expertise — rather than selling yourself as an object to be degraded. I understand that not all sex work everywhere is always like this, but I think it’s either naive or disingenuous to deny that most of it is.
And as discussed in the previous thread, in fact, we do put limits on what people are allowed to do for money, precisely to limit exploitation. I could offer to work with nuclear waste with no protective gear for lots of money, but it would be illegal for anyone to hire me to do that, no matter how bad I needed the money or whether there was anything else for me to do. More realistically, I could offer to work 60 hours a week at Wal-Mart without asking to be paid overtime, but that’s also illegal. Those labor laws exist for a reason.
So yeah. I think even if you do want to sell yourself as an object for exploitation, there’s a compelling social reason not to let you do so. Just as there’s a compelling social reason not to let you work without benefit of safety measures or overtime pay, no matter how much you want to.
The illegal market would continue to thrive for at least two main reasons. The first is the reason Amanda suggests: because many men who use prostitutes want to control, exploit, and abuse another person (male or female), and satisfying that desire would become a lot more expensive in any system that included effective protection for prostitutes. So men motivated in that way would still rely on illegal prostitutes.
Another reason the illegal market would persist is that even those who just wanted sex (there are probably plenty of johns who chiefly have this goal) would prefer an illegal transaction because they were more certain it would be anonymous, so their marriages and careers would be more likely to be affected.
I cannot speak directly to Amanda’s assertion as regards the johns - I’ve never bothered seeking out a hooker, nor have I seen any research on the topic. I know a couple of people who have touched on the industry (someone who may or may not have worked in a brothel, and a vice cop), but I don’t know anyone who’s admitted to me to have bought sex (although I have my suspicions in a couple of cases).
But I think she is wrong for the significant majority of guys seeking out prostitutes, although the factor is there for some.
But, passing that over, you have a problem with your argument - in a society with a functioning legal market for sex workers, what are the motivations for a sex worker to sell it illegally? The suggestion I’ve seen so far is a desire never to be registered; the problem with that argument is that it is very possible to have a regulated market without registration.
Which leads me to suggest that the only reason a hooker would seek out abusive sex work over conventional sex work, when he or she has the right to refuse to be abused in the course of working and when he or she can engage in conventional sex work, is money. Men pay them extra to accept the abuse - and the hooker has deliberately made the decision to cater to that as opposed to the larger market for more conventional sex.
That doesn’t make it not disquieting and probably harmful - but it does mean that they’re not victims.
The illegal market exists in NV and in other countries. So how does the why matter?
The cost, red tape, or public nature of licensing.
(Well, or de facto slavery, but no one’s seriously suggesting that should be legal.)
(And regarding the “registering them will publicly shame them” argument: laws could demand the confidentiality of that info. Granted, it might leak anyway if authorities don’t cooperate, but pretty much any scheme we’re talking about here, short of unrestricted legalization, involves some degree of faith in law enforcement.)
A cursory examination of the Intro to that document does reveal the 89% figure. HOWEVER, that figure was reflective of their total interview sample, the majority of which were streetwalkers. It is no wonder they got an 89% figure. Hell, my person experience interviewing streetwalkers here in Miami (n=47) came away with all but one saying they wanted to get out. That is hardly reflective of those working voluntarily in licensed brothels.
They also make the statement that 40% of their sample were coerced into prostitution. You can’t include them in a citation here against legalization since they’re not in the work voluntarily to begin with. If someone forced me to work in ANY job I didn’t want to do, I can assure you I’d be “desperate” to get out as well. That speaks nothing about those who choose to do the work voluntarily, however.
Amanda — from time to time you have written about “what I’ve learned from blogging” (& actually maybe this is in your book, which I have not read), but at the end of these threads I just wonder how you deal with confronting hordes of soulless monsters month after month. The arguments here — in the face of every kind of empirical evidence — that johns are awesome, hookers do it for the love, that any stupid-ass explanation that sounds economic is teh smart and teh incontrovertible, god, how do you deal? I realized the other day when I made an argument involving friendship that many of the misogynists that are drawn here are almost equally heartless misanthropes — their hating on women comes first but their hating on men is a very close second. Obviously you’ve got a lot of people talking at you here about another topic, so I am not loooking for a response in this thread, but if you ever did put together a post on “how I deal” it would make incredibly compelling reading.
Also, what chingona said.
How come when YOU say this you are a GODESS and when I say it I’m a BITCH?
To Caitlain,
She reported, in her book (not peer-reviewed, see the link upthread to the guardian review) that 80% of the women she interviewed in legal NV brothels wanted out. Her sample size was 45, which was small, but still.
You don’t think women can be coerced into legal prostitution, or that they can’t be coerced into illegal prostitution or abused when younger, and then transition into legal prostitution?
Thomas, TSID March 13, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Squashed, how does your stated assumption of rational economic actors explain men who kill their children, their estranged (escaped) wives, and themselves? ”
Freak cases happen. But deal with most common cases then work out from there. It’s not elegant. but sure as hell kill less people than pretending that shiny big thinking is enough.
The cost, red tape, or public nature of licensing.
True. I invite you to follow the link I porvided, which seems to cover these - sex workers are not registered, and agencies (which the sex workers pay) seem to handle the majority of the hassles.
I’ll dig up some articles from some credible magazines about the actual experience of sex workers in NZ when I get into work.
The difference is that working at Wal-Mart, being a nurse, or being a grad student are all jobs where you have legal rights and legal recourse if you are being abused.
Not to mention workers comp., unemployment insurance, and disability. But sex workers are entitled to those benefits because we have to punish the men.
aren’t entitled even…oy…
Squashed, you live in a fantasy world. Those of us who listen to the experiences of the women in our lives, and who offer them safe opportunities to tell their stories, know that somewhere around a third or a quarter of women in our lives, sometimes more depending on our social position, have been beaten or sexually assaulted. Those numbers are borne out by researchers like Koss (who is in turn backed up by some US government sources): one in four women who go to US universities experience attempted rapes, one in eight a completed rape, defined under then-current Ohio law. It is tough to say how prevalent sex trafficking is, but in Queens not long ago there was a tour operator that ran a business sending men to East Asia to have sex with children. You can go on pretending that when bad things happen to women it is some kind of “special case,” but that’s as valid as saying that every accident on a commercial fishing vessel is a special case. In fact, if it happens all the time, it’s a systemic phenomenon. Commercial fishing is dangerous, violence against women is systemic. That’s the real world. if you ignore it, you are stubbornly insisting on being a part of the problem.
As a Dutchman I feel the need to respond. Prostitution has never been illegal in the Netherlands. In 1999, we canceled the 1911 law that made brothels illegal. Our hopes were that thus prostitutes would have better access to health care, would get better working conditions (without the usual coercion and downright abuse), would unionize, in other words; make prostitution a viable, safe career option. Not that much different from what Kristen proposes here.
Unfortunately, we weren’t as successful as we hoped. Don’t get me wrong, the prostitutes that work in the now legal brothels are certainly better off than before. However, most johns don’t like to visit these brothels. And that’s where we failed in the Netherlands (and where we fail everywhere).
Legalizing prostitution to make it a safe career option for the prostitutes is just one side of the coin. We also have to, as a society, accept that people visit prostitutes.
Of course they can. I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise (if I even did).
I’m not sure what relevance that has to legalizing or decrminalizing prostitution in general, though. Coercing someone into any line of work is illegal and no one has suggsted decriminalizing that at all.
As I stated earlier, Farley’s work been discredited on this subject in academia. The reasons have already been cited. Not that her opinions and assertions aren’t totally without validity, just that you have to take them with a grain of salt and examine the real world situation as it exists, and not as she portrays it on her web sites and in her “research findings.
My biggest problem with prostitution being illegal is that I cannot see how we can make something that is perfectly legal to do for free a crime if done for money. But legal or otherwise, it’s a sad, sad industry.
Nor do I particularly see how prostitution could be legalized, but with a requirement for registration; no one is required to register before having sex for free.
Thomas, TSID March 13, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Commercial fishing is dangerous, violence against women is systemic. That’s the real world. if you ignore it, you are stubbornly insisting on being a part of the problem.”
… therefore make it illegal and sings la la la like nothing happens is the best course of action. I am sure the situation will change sometimes if everybody just sings louder.
whatever.
In Nevada, all prostitutes (the legal ones, at least) have to register with the County Sheriff’s office. They have a background check performed, and if they have no serious criminal record and their health checks come back clean, they get a license to work.
In fact, Squashed, I am a Swedish model proponent.
And maybe if you try to change the world, and I try to change the world, and many other people try to change the world, it will actually change. Or we can just say, “hey, it sucks for some people. Guess that’s too bad, but that’s not my problem.” You would apparently rather say that every woman that gets killed, beaten or raped is its own individual case, and not part of any societal pattern at all.
But as you say, “whatever.”
Not true. It has another purpose, which is to blame prostitutes for anything negative that happens to them. It’s their own fault for CHOOSING to be whores, and there’s an undertone of “and they probably get off on it anyway”.
Amanda, you can then put one cherrypicked article against the other. However, still, even if you say that the article gives a dark side to Sweden’s decriminalization, it does negate Kristof’s point that Sweden doesn’t face the same problems as the Netherlands, since it clearly does. Gangs. Problems with condoms. Prostitutes without any bargaining power. Underaged prostitutes.
The larger point, I think, is whether you decriminalize or legalize, you aren’t going to address the big problems - working conditions for prostitutes, and the violence they are subjected to - by a simple change in the legal status of prostitutes, but you are simply clearing the ground to address that problem. This is why I think (utopianly - it is easy to forget in these discussions that nothing is going to happen in the U.S., that the same alliance of church and state is going to crush any attempt to change prostitution laws, and that patriarchy, expressed through the cops, the johns, etc., will continue to encourage treating prostitutes like shit ) that prostitution should be monopolized by a guild, like the American Medical Association or the American Bar Association. I think that is a regulatory structure that mitigates the brothel problem (which is, I should say, a problem also faced by migrant agricultural workers and by meatpackers - which attract vulnerable populations, like immigrants, and provide on site housing, and similarly treat workers like prisoners).
I think Aimai is right that decriminalizing/legalizing will lead to the loss of the stigma, but I think that will take a long time We have the present prostitution regime because the Nineteenth century, far from being the Victorian values time of Gingrich’s twisted nostalgia, was the veritable age of prostitution - it exploded as women immigrated from the country into the city. I’ve read incredible estimates of the number of child prostitutes in London. Stefan Zweig, in his memoirs of Vienna, mentions that when he was a kid, he always passed by prostitutes when he bought candy at the candy store in his middle class neighborhood - and they would often follow him home, trying to sell their services. When patriarchy is unchallenged, there are a lot more prostitutes - which tells us a lot about the industry.
Caitlain,
Show me where her peer-reviewed work has been discredited, and I’ll bite.
You disregarded the stats. from the article I cited b/c you stated that 40% of the women had been coerced into prostitution. If women can be coerced into legal prostitution, as you acknowledge, the harms still exist. That was my point.
Isn’t that a problem of a patriarchal system being in place rather than specifically a problem of legalization?
If we imagine that we could put any system we could devise into place, ignoring the challenges of enacting any sort of feminist-driven reform of sexwork laws in a patriarchal society, is there no possible approach in which sex work could be legalized while placing the overall power in the hands of sex workers rather than johns?
The decriminalization approach seems like it would solve some problems but not necessarily others. It removes the direct threat of extortion-rape from the police but doesn’t actually compel them to help prostitutes in actual situations, nor does it necessarily help protect sex workers from assault, rape, or threatening violence by johns — I guess I’m skeptical that the police force wouldn’t just switch to various technicalities for harassing and refusing to help prostitutes, the same way that cops regularly use their power to threaten and attack women who haven’t committed any crime.
I would also be very interested to hear how you think this issue intersects with male prostitution.
Ismone: I would say my twenty year military career left me with a “basic understanding” of PTSD. But perhaps I did not make myself clear: do you mean to say that having sex in return for money is the “traumatic event” that gives these women PTSD?
Or is it other events–abuse by johns or pimps or cops? If so, the problem is not the sale of sex, but the construction of institutional and social rules that make these traumatic events possible without giving the victims some recourse, such as support from authorities and treatment.
If the latter, then changing the institutional context might mitigate the negative consequences of making this choice. For example, legalization might make unionization possible and provide a layer of protection for workers.
And indeed, the same study you cite asserts that “prolonged and repeated trauma usually precedes entry into prostitution,” but supports the claim only by pointing out that “55-90% of prostitutes report a childhood sexual abuse history” (page 35 of Prostitution, Trafficking, and Traumatic Stress). If Farley’s subjects had PTSD before they even became prostitutes, then legalizing prostitution would not increase the incidence of PTSD among prostitutes–and might in fact decrease it, by creating an institutional structure that keeps abused kids out of the business and creates incentives for victims to get treatment.
BTW, you can find a review of this book in Volume 6, Issue 3 (2005) of the Journal of Trauma and Dissociation. I can’t find a full-text link, so I guess I don’t get a huckleberry, but your library should have it.
Chingona: the money offered to the poor women may change the calculation they make as they exercise their free will by introducing a new incentive. But it does not interfere with their power to make a choice by taking away their agency.
R@d@r: This baffles me, as well.
If you thought that social disapproval could cause PTSD, you certainly weren’t applying your understanding of the condition to the question at hand.
It seems, from the research, that a combination of physical abuse (at the hands of clients and pimps and in early childhood) + sexual abuse + sex with a large number of partners causes it. It seems to be most connected to number of clients, if I recall the paper correctly. But violence of course is a factor.
I agree that the book has problems, but it isn’t presented as peer-reviewed. See upthread where I acknowledge this. I want to know if anyone can question the peer-reviewed research. So, yes, you are right, you are not my huckleberry.
I am in favor of decriminalizing, and think it will help with police abuse (although I think prostitutes are still considered not credible by most juries), but I do not know how much good it will do with pimp/john abuse.
What is your take on how decriminalizing will protect prostitutes from violent pimps and johns?
In terms of anticipating some loss of stigma, I’m sorry, but that cannot be posited without contextualizing the stigma of prostitution within the very real, effective, and in many cases dangerous stigma that still exists against women who just have sex, with or without consent, without any money entering into the picture at all.
If I have consensual sex, I’m stigmatized if I want it. If I give it away (well, there it is, right? I gave it away; we all know what that says about me). If it’s taken from me, I’m stigmatized too, because, well, it’s probably my fault because I really wanted to just give it away, or I wouldn’t have been in the position to have it taken from me, anyway. If I then add money to the equation, then the stigma is all the more.
There’s a hierarchy of disapproval, right: (1) Has het sex for procreation only in the bounds of a lawful het marriage, and doesn’t like it; (2) has that het married sex only to make babies and does like it; (3) has het married sex whenever she wants, and does like it, and prevents contraception ever time; (4) is violently raped by a stranger, with the requisite patriarchy-approved evidentiary physical damage and trauma; (5) has het sex outside of marriage and likes it; (6) is raped but deserves it, and isn’t injured enough; (7) has non vanilla het or non het sex seven ways from sunday, and lots of it, and likes it and has no shame; and, finally, (8) prostitutes.
Society punishes us just for having sex, just for being sexual, just for having the sex organs we have. The stigma associated with being a prostitute is inextricably tied to the stigma associated with being a woman who has sex. The stigma from prostitution isn’t from its illegality, it’s because a female prostitute is the sluttiest of the slutty women, and greedy to boot.
And you know, that is a big part of why this is different than other “dirty” jobs that we nonetheless don’t outlaw.
Shorter me: The largest part of the stigma here is gender-based. I just don’t believe that decriminalization or legalization is going to wipe that away.
Yeah, because nobody looks down on strippers at all.
Most jurisdictions have laws about bribery, baby-selling, etc. Easily circumvented laws, sure, but the effort is made.
I agree with that but not so much with your ranking of women in terms of stigma. I think that’s been more fluid throughout history, and the stigma and punishment meted out to prostitutes has not always been the absolute worst. For example, the “hooker with a heart of gold” argument/story doesn’t combat patriarchal myths about prostitution and female sexuality; it’s part of that mythology. For people who are specifically threatened by female sexual autonomy and subjectivity rather than female sexual activity per se, prostitutes are reassuring because their job is (by and large) to cater to men’s desires and not their own. For people who are invested in the double standard (the patriarch’s right to have a madonna at home and a variety of whores on the side), prostitutes are useful and reassuring.
That’s why prostitution is a patriarchal institution and not the ultimate rebellion against patriarchy.
Ismone: If you think I said that “social disapproval” causes PTSD, then I must not have made myself clear. I think that the institutional and social structures created in the context of prohibition make traumatic events more likely by creating incentives for pimps/johns to abuse and for prostitutes to avoid the authorities and refuse treatment.
So changing these social and institutional factors could reduce the occurrence of PTSD by reducing the number of traumatic events. Reducing the amount of selling sex for money will not, unless it also leads to PTSD. I’m not convinced that decriminalization will do that, because it won’t put the pimps out of business. Legalization may not either, except at the margins, unless the law constructs incentives very carefully.
And the amount of all this exploitation–and the failure of legalization to reduce it–may provide the “compelling social reason” that justifies prohibition. I’m just reluctant to have the state take away the right of adults to manage their lives, even if it brings them harm.
As for legalization changing the stigma, let me say that I don’t think legalization of prostitution–or stripping–will reduce the stigma on these activities until our attitudes about sex–whether or not associated with an exchange of money–changes.
Elinor:
Actually, we’re on the same page. I agree with all of that.
The ranking wasn’t meant to be empirical or unfluid, and it wasn’t meant to assert that there is only stigma, or no benefit to women for enacting any of those roles in “patriarchy affirming” ways.
I think chingona hit the nail on the head. There are forms of coersion that aren’t always violent, one of those is money to people who are desperate.
A second point: If you seriously think that if prostitution is legal, prostitutes will have no problem moving out of the profession because it loses the stigma of being *illegal* you have never in your life met a stripper.
Got it. Sorry to be snappish. I was in another thread about this yesterday, and three people on the same thread argued that PTSD was caused by disapproval of hookers.
I misread what you wrote.
And yeah, that makes sense, anything that can make it safer for the prostitutes, I am for.
-Iz
and the hooker has deliberately made the decision to cater to that as opposed to the larger market for more conventional sex.
That doesn’t make it not disquieting and probably harmful - but it does mean that they’re not victims.
Are you kidding? Money isn’t some frivolous luxury, it’s something you need in order to survive. If a hooker has to accept abuse to make money, yes, she is a victim.
I think that the institutional and social structures created in the context of prohibition make traumatic events more likely by creating incentives for pimps/johns to abuse and for prostitutes to avoid the authorities and refuse treatment
I think they make it likely, but when you say more likely, what are you comparing it to? What are the rates of PTSD in prohibition versus those in various decriminalization schemes? Many decriminalization/legalization policies are as bad as prohibition in disregarding the prostitutes’ rights and welfare, after all. We’d have to look at PTSD under prohibition, straight-up legalization, legalization with regulation, decriminalization of prostitutes but not of johns and pimps, and decriminalization of prostitutes and johns but not of pimps in order to compare them.
Elinor and PRHM have it exactly right. Women are stigmatized for being sexual — in fact, for being women, because women who are not sexual, or not in ways that contribute to male sexual gratification, are stigmatized also. Women who do sex work or sexually oriented entertainment are stigmatized whether the work is legal or not; strippers, pro dommes, phone sex workers, nude models, and porn actresses all catch shit for what they do; the last, if they are at the very top, can achieve a kind of celebrity but always a tainted, snickering kind. None of them can interact with the rest of the world without being reduced by many folks to the job. And celebrities whose sexuality becomes at all exposed to the public often get reduced to it. I remember a period of several years when Madonna was talked about almost exclusively in the context of her photographs and sexual persona; Paris Hilton has become virtually synonymous with Sex Tape as has Pamela Anderson and Kim Kardashian.
For sex work to be a non-stigmatized profession, we need significant social change, not just legal reform.
In order for prostitution to be legal and yet still viable, the scheme either has to preserve the customer’s right to treat the prostitute like trash (which is why it works in Nevada, though it does the actual prostitutes little good), or an illegal side market of prostitution will flourish next to the legal one.
Doesn’t that still mean legalization represents an unambiguous improvement in some aspects? Presumably the “illegal side market” would be smaller than the current total market. Maybe nearly the same number of people would get hurt by the business itself, but fewer would be marginalized, fined, or imprisoned by the government.
Of course, ultimately the only way to reduce trafficking and abuse is to crack down on trafficking and abuse; but such a crackdown would be a helluva lot more humane if it didn’t also crack down on people who would be okay with participating in a regulated system.
Ahh the endless moralizing. I feel this way about many things, particularly politics/government, but also bars, cigarettes, crack, X games, Hollywood, etc. They are all repugnant; let’s ban them all! No, wait…
I have no problem with moralizing, but I shouldn’t be forced into your or anyone else’s moral or immoral position. Prostitution at its core is a consensual transaction (and those who make it non-consensual are guilty of forcing their position). Yes, it can be degrading, but it is not always, and yes, it is repulsive to most of us (including me), and yes, there are often sad and criminal elements involved. That’s still not your right to try to shut it down for those who wish to conduct it as a legitimate business.
Modern society looks to be moving away from laws based on religious beliefs (except for those frightening fundamentalists). Wonderful. What now frightens me is how we appear to be moving toward laws based on arbitrary mob behavior and choices. Centering around the use of force would be a more sensible direction.
…. man ……who cares about social stigma bla bla… that is way far below in priority list.
deal with : not getting shot, not getting jailed, secure/legit banking transaction, law protection, protection from exploitation/coercion, access to government service, proper legal protection, decouple to organized crime. etc. etc.
all that can’t happen without decriminalization.
giving blow job to john is degrading or not is pretty small issue compare to more pressing problems of not getting shot while thinking how to pay next month rent.
Just a few comments.
1. There several sex worker rights organizations in the US, all of which favor decriminalization. I have to assume these ladies know what’s best for themselves.
2. The Centers for Disease Control estimates there are 1 million prostitutes in the US. The sex workers rights people and the scholars who study prostitution, of whom there are several, agree that the vast number of encounters between sex workers and their clients are encounters between consenting adults. I see no reason why sex between consenting adults should be criminalized.
3. The Swedish model makes no sense because it says selling sex is OK, but buying it is illegal, which is clearly illogical. There are lots of reports from Swedish sex workers that the law in Sweden makes their work more unsafe. Hardly a model for protecting women.
4. It’s largely the criminalization of prostitution that makes sex work unsafe. If the clients and pimps knew that the police would protect the ladies the way they would protect any other citizen, the ladies would be much safer. Also, as mentioned here, since prostitution is illegal currently sex workers often are forced to have sex with the police to avoid arrest. See the recent Chicago study of street prostitutes.
5. Melissa Farley is an intellectual fraud. None of her “studies” has ever been published in a peer reviewed journal. Her work is extensively criticized by all the scholars who have looked at it. It’s why she publishes is places like the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism: it’s edited by law students who don’t know anything about social science reserach. So the scholars reject her work and conclusions, as do the sex worker rights organziations.
6. The prostitution laws are an unconstitutional violation of citizens’ right to privacy. Neither the federal government nor a state could outlaw sex between consenting adults. There is no logical reason why they can outlaw sex between consenting adults who discuss payments of money before hand.
The idea that legalization alone will destigmatize prostitution is pretty naive. Aimai, I thought you were an anthropologist? This seems a rather disingenuous argument coming from you.
Prostitution (particularly brothel prostitution) has been legal at various points in history, but prostitutes still carried a heavy social stigma and suffered varying degrees of marginalization and abuse, depending on where they fell on the hierarchy (imagine the difference between a street whore and a courtesan). Pretending that legalization will automatically lead to neutrality, if not outright respectability, is magical thinking. Whether prostitutes are stigmatized depends on whether or not our culture believes that selling sex is degrading. Given that, even in the best legalization schemes, most people still believe that it is degrading the social position of the prostitute will not change and she will remain vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.
On registration: in Nevada, a former brothel prostitute can be prohibited from getting a license to do in-home massages simply because of their past prostitution experience. That is one way in which licensing prostitutes can be used to harm their future career options.
JP, there are ample cites to Farley’s peer reviewed work on the thread. The book is not, and there is also a lot of criticism of the methodology she uses in the non-PR stuff; but saying things that are demonstrably factually wrong will not get you any credibility.
You call the Swedish model “illogical” because it criminalizes the buyer and decriminalizes the seller. That’s “asymmetrical,” not “illogical.” Do you not understand the difference, or were you just shooting your mouth off?
Squashed, your density knows no bounds. The as recounted at length above, the social stigma is the driving force behind every problem we’re talking about, from the way the cops and prosecutors and juries treat prostitutes to whether they can get other jobs and get out. Eliminate the stigma, and every other problem becomes solvable; but legal reform will not eliminate the stigma. I would say, “do keep up,” but you are clearly unable or unwilling to engage in the discussion that the serious people on the thread are having. The serious people: those of us who do not live in a world where people are economic wealth-maximizing robots starting from roughly equal positions and acting free of social constraints.
Since prostitution law reform in New Zealand, we don’t seem to have had the same issues as the European countries - at least, inasmuch as the media hasn’t gone nuts over any wave of child trafficking or such.
NZ law, as on the NZ Prostitutes’ Collective site:
http://www.nzpc.org.nz/page.php?page_name=Law
Whatever other differences we have with him, ya gotta concede Altgeld’s excellent point about Yale law students: whatta buncha total maroons!
Also, now that I think about it, so many laws are illogical! Like, putting poison in the food supply — sure, we’ve prohibited that. Eating poisonous food? We are awash with scofflaws! And, sure, bankrobbers go to jail — but what about the ACCESSORY TO THE CRIME, the banks that are all full of luscious money?
Clearly, travesties such as these only stand because so-called “top-notch” law schools like Yale train such slack-jawed idiots. It’s a mad world, my friends.
I take issue with the idea that men visit prostitutes to degrade women. Most of the clients I saw when I was a prostitute (and I wasn’t a high-priced one - $130 an hour, insert same-cost-as-a-lawyer joke here - and, yes, I was underage, but not by a lot) were just guys who wanted some sex without strings or bother. They were always nice - it was more like I was doing them a favour than the other way around.
A lot of the girls I worked with had previously been on the streets (where you make more money and “do” a higher volume) and were working at an escort agency because they had been “red zoned,” so they couldn’t be downtown after dark… and from their reports, working the street is risker, safety-wise, because it was more anonymous, but that only a few times in their own experiences did they feel uncomfortable or threatened. My sample size, by the way, is about 45 women too… And many long nights spent chatting between calls.
Where we were exploited was by the agency owner, not the johns — the “house fees” for simply setting foot in the place were outrageous and the hours completely sucked, and there was nobody to complain to since it was extralegal.
Only once was I pressured to do something I didn’t want to do - I told the guy to stop being an asshole and I left the room. End of story.
And yes, I quit when I no longer needed the money. It’s impossible to tell people what you do (just try it) and it is difficult to find subsequent employment due to the gap in your resume.
I suspect that part of the rise in underground sex trade when it is regulated is because the legal agencies require men to identify themselves — the last thing you want to do when you’re doing possibly the worst thing in the world, according to society, which is paying for sex.
Having sex with a large number of people didn’t give me PSTD - I’m educated, I’ve been happily married for ten years, and am employed in a good field. Maybe I’m an exception to the rule, because I was able to get out young and not be sidelined or stigmatized (by others, or myself).
I am but one data point, and perhaps an outlier, but my experience tells me that it’s not an intrinsically degrading job; it is only degrading because it is so horribly stigmatized by society.
The sex workers rights people and the scholars who study prostitution, of whom there are several, agree that the vast number of encounters between sex workers and their clients are encounters between consenting adults.
Wow, that’s a claim, innit?
ALL sex workers’ rights people and ALL of the scholars who study prostitution “agree” on that proposition? Seriously? I had no idea that there was literally NO controversy about the idea of “consent” and prostitution, much less regarding the (apparent) “fact” that the “vast number” of transactions between sex workers and their “clients” (love that, btw) are between “consenting adults.”
I just LOVE finding out that something I thought might be a nuanced, complicated policy question turns out to be so very simple. I can’t wait to get home from work, feed the fam, and then hop on the interwebs to search for all of that scholarly consensus.
I’ll be sure to report back later, after confirming that there aren’t any scholars or sex workers’ advocates out there who study prostitution but believe that there are some troubling aspects to the definition of “consent” in the sex trades.
I take issue with the idea that men visit prostitutes to degrade women. Most of the clients I saw when I was a prostitute (and I wasn’t a high-priced one - $130 an hour, insert same-cost-as-a-lawyer joke here - and, yes, I was underage, but not by a lot) were just guys who wanted some sex without strings or bother. They were always nice - it was more like I was doing them a favour than the other way around.
A lot of the girls I worked with had previously been on the streets (where you make more money and “do” a higher volume) and were working at an escort agency because they had been “red zoned,” so they couldn’t be downtown after dark… and from their reports, working the street is risker, safety-wise, because it was more anonymous, but that only a few times in their own experiences did they feel uncomfortable or threatened. My sample size, by the way, is about 45 women too… And many long nights spent chatting between calls.
Where we were exploited was by the agency owner, not the johns — the “house fees” for simply setting foot in the place were outrageous and the hours completely sucked, and there was nobody to complain to since it was extralegal.
Only once was I pressured to do something I didn’t want to do - I told the guy to stop being an asshole and I left the room. End of story.
And yes, I quit when I no longer needed the money. It’s impossible to tell people what you do (just try it) and it is difficult to find subsequent employment due to the gap in your resume.
I suspect that part of the rise in underground sex trade when it is regulated is because the legal agencies require men to identify themselves — the last thing you want to do when you’re doing possibly the worst thing in the world, according to society, which is paying for sex.
Having sex with a large number of people didn’t give me PTSD - I’m educated, I’ve been happily married for ten years, and am employed in a good field. Maybe I’m an exception to the rule, because I was able to get out young and not be sidelined or stigmatized (by others, or myself).
I am but one data point, and perhaps an outlier, but my experience tells me that it’s not an intrinsically degrading job; it is only degrading because it is so horribly stigmatized by society.
Thomas, TSID March 13, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Eliminate the stigma, and every other problem becomes solvable; but legal reform will not eliminate the stigma. ”
I tell you what, watch this video while you try to think up some grand social engineering plan for “eleminating stigma”
This is what happen when tool to fight hard crime is used to solve problem.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxgNKNEtk18
Located and extracted an article about the reality of brothel prostitution in NZ.
Amanda, you keep referring to ‘the vast majority’ of johns as ‘assholes,’ but where are you getting that from? What do you know about the lives of people who hire prostitutes? Do you know any johns? In particular, do you know any regulars? There are loads of testimonials to be found online by prostitutes and johns alike, describing the close (and complex) relationships they’ve formed over months or years; such people don’t seem to fit into your mental image of the trade. Why’s that, do you think?
squashed, the now-famous video shows police abusing a woman who was arrested for drunk driving.
Are you suggesting that drunk driving be decriminalized because police beat people? In the real world, the rest of us think that drunk driving kills lots of innocent people, and that it needs to be illegal and prosecuted.
The video comes closer, in fact, to making my point, that in patriarchy men beat women and often get away with it.
Glenn Greenwald…
Although it involves a much milder form of sex work, I’m reminded of a scene in the documentary Live Nude Girls Unite! After the strippers at the Lusty Lady have unionized and their strike has been all over the news, they find an online message board where a bunch of their regular patrons are bitching about how much the club has gone downhill. Even though the women haven’t changed and they’re all doing the same things they’ve always done, suddenly they’re ugly and unsexy and various regulars are declaring they’ll never go to the Lusty Lady again. For some of these guys, strippers just weren’t hot if they got sick leave. Fortunately for them, there were still plenty of non-unionized strip clubs they could visit.
There’s definitely a sizable percentage of men who get off on the idea that the women they hire for sex work are doing it against their will and are under the man’s control. Dr. Laura acknowledged this with her disgusting comment about how Silda Spitzer drove her husband to visit prostitutes by not being submissive enough. What Dr. Laura was saying was that the basic appeal of prostitutes is obedience, not sex, so if you want to hold on to a man who’s into that, you have to be even more obedient and groveling. She’s probably right. The thing is, for some insane reason, she thinks this is worth doing.
Caroline:
I think even if you do want to sell yourself as an object for exploitation, there’s a compelling social reason not to let you do so. Just as there’s a compelling social reason not to let you work without benefit of safety measures or overtime pay, no matter how much you want to.
This thread seems to be going in circles. Caitlan and Scott have made the case that sex work isn’t inherently any more exploitative than other work, a point with which the linked LGM post by Scott Lemieux, I, and seemingly Amanda, agree: while most prostitutes are being exploited, we agree that there are some who are not, even if they constitute a small minority. Of course, all labor is exploitative and objectifying in a capitalist market. Every one of us who drags ourselves out of bed when we’d rather be sleeping, who stays at work rather than going home and playing with our kids, who spends the bulk of our productive lives at work that means nothing to us is having our bodies and our lives stolen from us in exchange for money. The institutions that employ us do not generally regard us as people or have a relationship with us that imbues our labor with social meaning; we are more commonly regarded as labor units employed to produce profit. The objectification is clear-cut and pretty universally acknowledged.
The statement that sex is inherently different from other kinds of work relies on a specific set of assumptions about psychological and cultural attitudes toward sex, many of which Amanda and others have been very active in opposing.
Of course, we all agree that sex work in practice is degrading and dangerous, just like your example of working in a radioactive environment without protection. But this is exactly the concern that is driving the push for legalization, which would allow for health and labor regulations to protect the workers.
It’s true that we consider some personal assets too precious to allow them to be commoditized: bodily organs, for instance. Should sex belong in this category? Much of the debate here has been, it seems to me, an attempt to draw lines between practices that should be illegal no matter what (such as those that are actually dangerous), and those that are not different in kind from other forms of labor that we generally allow to be sold on the market. Whether legalization would successfully eliminate the bulk of the current illegal trade while protecting legal sex workers from undue exploitation (i.e., out of line with other industries) is a question on which, I think, reasonable people can differ. But that doesn’t seem to be your position.
You seem to believe that sex is special; that it is always more dehumanizing and dangerous than, say, steelworking or panhandling. I am not convinced, nor am I convinced by Amanda’s invocation of the women standing in the rain delivering $10 blowjobs as categorically different or more outrageous than many other forms of work. Coalmining, for instance. Scrubbing toilets, as Lemieux’s post said. People end up doing terrible things for money. I’ve heard rumors that some young people join the Army and end up getting their legs blown off, and that others become corporate lawyers to pay off their student loans. Should these things be illegal? Perhaps. But like I said, I’m not convinced.
FWIW, in practice I’m a fan of the Swedish approach. I believe there was a proposed program in DC a while back where johns would have their cars impounded on the spot if they were caught trolling for prostitutes. I loved the idea: not only would it stick it to the suburban sex tourists and make them think twice about driving into the city to “play”, but they’d have to show up at home the very same night and explain to their wives what happened to the car. I’m pretty sure it never got implemented.
Oh, and Altgeld, disingenuous much?:
None of her “studies” has ever been published in a peer reviewed journal.
More absolutes. Shall we check that?
First off, the Farley article linked above was published in the Journal of Trauma Practice, Vol. 2, No. 3/4, 2003, pp 33-74. That journal is, in fact, a peer-reviewed journal. See here. I don’t have any idea if it is a well-regarded journal or not. Not my field. But it is, in fact, a peer-reviewed journal. Hmmmm.
In fact, a simple internet search turned up a primarily peer-reviewed c.v. for Dr. Farley. Hmmm.
Looks like something she participated in was ARCHIVED at the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, but that’s not QUITE the same thing as saying that’s the only place that will publish her, is it?
And, about that? Regarding the prestige of publishing in student-run law journals (and here I know whereof I speak): All, or almost all, legal scholarship is published in “law reviews” or “law journals,” which are, traditionally, not peer-reviewed but rather edited by law students.
Therefore, the vast majority of the most influential legal scholarship of article-length in the United States, since, well, since there’s been influential legal scholarship in the United States, has been published in law reviews and journals edited by law students. The Michigan Law Review is edited by law students. The Harvard Law Review is edited by law students.
Criticism of legal scholarship on the basis that it’s published in a journal edited by law students is simply criticism of legal scholarship. That might be a valid criticism, it might not (the subject comes up over and over, you know), but honey, please, that’s how it’s done.
Thomas, TSID March 13, 2008 at 5:40 pm
squashed, the now-famous video shows police abusing a woman who was arrested for drunk driving. ”
Shreveport is casino town (plenty of hookers and drugs floating around), the police has database. Fairly well funded, not to mention giant air force base complete with terrorists hysteria.
You make the connection, what did the police found during database scan? (Obviously the cop knows something from the record that women is just some disposable shrimp and he can get away with it.)
Why are we looking at other countries and not Vegas?
This is like gun control arguments that rest on things like the fact that Japan has low crime and strict gun laws. That’s true, but Japan is Japan.
Margalis March 13, 2008 at 5:52 pm
Why are we looking at other countries and not Vegas?”
My guess, I think because Vegas law is designed to sustain entertainment industry, instead of aiming to improve things. I don’t think nevada prostitution law improved situation all that much.
Also is there any evidence that making prostitution illegal actually improves the situation?
That’s the other big problem with these arguments. Why do I have to argue that prostitution should be legal? Shouldn’t the honus be on others to argue that it should be illegal?
Can anyone point to well researched data that shows the making prostitution illegal cuts down on things like sex slavery? If it’s in this thread I missed it.
Are you kidding? Money isn’t some frivolous luxury, it’s something you need in order to survive. If a hooker has to accept abuse to make money, yes, she is a victim.
If you go back and read, the comment was predicated on the prostitute having the right to refuse to be abused in the course of working and he or she having the ability to engage in conventional sex work, which are the conditions de jure and de facto in NZ since 2003.
Under these circumstances, the hooker does not have to accept abuse to make money. Indeed, he or she specifically has the right to tell the punter to sod off. However, they might make more money if they did, which is the only reason I can see why someone would cater to those tastes.
I think a situation where hookers can tell the abusive to sod off without facing starvation or a beating from a pimp is a damned good thing.
Thomas, TSID March 13, 2008 at 5:40 pm
Are you suggesting that drunk driving be decriminalized because police beat people? In the real world, the rest of us think that drunk driving kills lots of innocent people, and that it needs to be illegal and prosecuted. ”
(not sure if it snagged by spam filter) Shreveport is a casino town, plenty of hookers and drug. The police has a connected database. Obviously that cop saw the women’s record and decide she has something. Cop isn’t stupid and go beat up connected people. Obviously the cop knows she is not gonna be able to fight in court all that well.
Why do I have to argue that prostitution should be legal? Shouldn’t the honus be on others to argue that it should be illegal?
(1) Because, by and large, in the U.S., it’s already illegal. People who are arguing that Spitzer shouldn’t be prosecuted because the illegality of prostitution is stupid have the onus to demonstrate that the law should be changed. You aren’t going to find a lot of studies demonstrating that MAKING prostitution illegal operated a change, because its primarily been illegal in modern times. The studies of modern changes to prostitution laws have been studying what happens when you go from illegal to legal or decriminalized because that’s what we have to work with. If you somehow want me to support legalization or decriminalization politically, say, here in Michigan where I live, YOU’LL have to convince ME, because the status quo is illegal. And currently, I’m unconvinced. I’m convinced the current system is broken and unworkable because it focuses on punishing the supply and not the demand. I’m not, however, convinced that legalization is a great plan, and I’m quite sure that I would never support legalization without regulation.
and, most importantly,
(2) um, it’s Amanda’s blog-post, isn’t it? Can’t she argue what she wants? Respond if you want, or don’t, but she’s not under some obligation to justify the status quo to you; she’s set forth some arguments that, as I read them, demonstrate that prostitution policy and how or whether it should change is not a simple or easy question, and that plain legalization is not necessarily going to be good for the women who make up the vast majority of prostitutes. This by way of backing up her argument that most legalization schemes aren’t proposed to benefit prostitutes but rather johns. If you still, despite all of that, believe legalization is better, well, then, YEAH, if you want us to hear it, you have to argue it.
And you know, I think it’s really telling that the VAST majority of the time we have these arguments, it’s because some powerful white man got busted with some high-class call girl. When vice is brutally rounding up the $15 blow-job working girls I used to drive by at State Fair and Woodward by the 8 Mile Strip and hauling them in, it’s not like there are a million op eds filling the papers.
In NZ, how does the hooker get paid if, for example, she has a day where they’re all assholes and she tells them all to sod off? She on some sort of hourly rate with the brothel or does she just hope tomorrow’s a better day?
“Oh, no, I admit that the Sad Unfuckable John does exist. But again, the stereotype that applies to 1% of customers is being utilized as a stand-in for the rest, who are more like Eliot Spitzer, who enjoys fucking and throwing prostitutes in jail.”
Where does Amanda get these accusations? Spitzer, for all of his evils, has never (to the best of my knowledge) jailed any of the prostitutes with whom he had sex. He was described by one as a “nice guy and good tipper.” The famous Kristen said he was “not difficult.” I believe he did prosecute a prostitution ring or two during his days in New York, but those were the people making the money at the top levels, and not the women themselves.
In short, for all of his asshole behavior in other sphere of life, there is absolutely no evidence that he was a jerk or a source of incarceration for prostitutes.
Also, there is no evidence that prostitution is any worse for someone’s mental/emotional/physical health than say, serving your country in Iraq, working in a slaughterhouse, being a stay-at-home-mom, selling crack, being a professor athlete, and so forth. It’s a job the same as any other, and I think part of what makes it difficult at the social stigmas that people note. Without many of the stigmas, I am sure that more people involved in sex work would be happier and healthier human beings, as would their clients.
Why are we looking at other countries and not Vegas?
Possibly because they serve as alternative models. While NZ only has 4 million people, there’s no reason why the same model might not be tried in an American city or State - you do have the advantage of 50 different legal regimes to try at once.
In NZ, how does the hooker get paid if, for example, she has a day where they’re all assholes and she tells them all to sod off? She on some sort of hourly rate with the brothel or does she just hope tomorrow’s a better day?
Based on my understanding (and this may be flawed), the brothels are agencies for the hookers, who are contracters rather than employees - the brothels host them, arrange the clients, and get paid by the hooker. As far as I can tell, an analog would be a taxi company.
If a hooker doesn’t screw, he or she doesn’t get paid. They can wind up losing money for the night. If they send away all their clients for being assholes, they should get out of the business. If the agency sends them only assholes, they can (and do) go to another agency. The agencies compete for hookers by providing steady jobs, vetting clients and handling money; they compete for clients by providing access to attractive hookers.
The hookers also have the option of setting up at home or in groups of up to four by themselves. I would assume that they use brothels because they provide value - it’s more efficient to work out of one and pay a cut than to try it yourself.
Sad, pathetic loser, conservative bloggers can purchase Real Doll surrogates. No harm to humans and their needs fulfilled
I haven’t seen anyone argue this. (Maybe I’m not paying enough attention?) It certainly isn’t a common argument.
The Kristof piece was an op-ed with essentially zero verifiable facts. I’m not a big fan of making things illegal for social engineering reasons, especially when there is no evidence the engineering works. I’d argue that prostitution should be legal because there isn’t any evidence that making it illegal is beneficial to anyone, and trading money for sex isn’t in itself a crime in my eyes.
I can sympathize with the realpolitik notion that prostitution should be illegal because that helps stem the inevitable negative outgrowths of prostitution. But I don’t see any evidence that that is actually the case.
Though I am not a “hobbyist” i have dabbled here and there over the years in the sex work industry. I dont fully understand how it can be said that the vast majority of men who visit sex workers are doing so to degrade women when the biggest push in the last several years has been for GFE (girlfriend experience) sex workers. This does not usually apply, as far as I’ve seen, to sex workers working the streets but it can. Many men, and all of the ones I know who see sex workers, do so because it is a no strings attached encounter that they see as mutually beneficial. Check out theeroticreview if you’d like to see how a lot of men really talk about sex workers (urban dictionary might help you with that site, a loooot of acronyms.) How does any of this apply to male sex workers or non-PIV sex workers. domme’s/fetish models and such, whose work is legal but can go over the line and often puts the worker in the same position a “full service” worker would be in?
I am a different James to the one above, but am sticking with this handle because I’ve used it here before.
“Criticism of legal scholarship on the basis that it’s published in a journal edited by law students is simply criticism of legal scholarship.”
Law journals are notorious havens of innumeracy. They are widely regarded as an absolute joke - no-one serious does quantitative research in the hope that they’ll have the honour of getting it published in a law journal, and no-one reads law journals expecting to find the next cutting edge stats paper. No-one is attacking legal scholarship; but reviewing social science research is simply outside the competence of a bunch of wannabe lawyers.
There aren’t any reliable statistics on the effects of prostitution. The problem is that you can’t count the number of prostitutes with problems, divide by the total number of prostitutes, and claim 80 in a 100 prostitutes have a problem (i.e use Farley’s method). People more into and out of prostitution - at the one end you have deeply disturbed women who are pimped out when they are very young, and are prostitutes for decades before they die. At the other end you have people who prostitute themselves for a few weeks or months to tide themselves over a financial crisis. If you count prosititutes at an instant in time you overestimate the proportion of long term prostitutes, relative to their real proportions.
Suppose you go out and count 50 sex slaves and 50 happy hookers. Is this a bang up case that 1 in 2 prositutes have problems? Well no, because if you did five counts over a period of time you could end up counting the 50 sex slaves 5 times each and 5 new sets of 50 happy hookers each time, and then conclude that 1 in 6 prostitutes have problems.
There’s no basis to justify any of the statistical claims people make in these discussions.
Amanda, there is a lot more light to be shined on this subject than the unreferenced opinions of a sweatshop supporting NY Times columnist.
It’s funny to see a columnist who supports sweatshops for their positive wealth effect, opposing the free movement of sex workers on the basis of the very poorly defined US-centric term “trafficking”.
I would suggest you put more weight on the views of sex worker unions around the world - and those academics who have studied the industry - rather than NY Times columnists, and those feminists who have studied only the US experience of $10 blowjobs.
Can I start on a positive note? Thomas’ comment (117? Firefox doesn’t render the numbers right. The one that begins “Elinor and PRHM have it exactly right.”). I agree with that 100%, wholeheartedly, without shadow of reservation.
God, that feels good on this blog this week.
Now onto convincing people I’m a tool of the patriarchy again by making points I’ve made already this week.
1) Decriminalising/legalising prostitution is not a panacea. The problems of abuse, especially in streetwalker terms, are more related to drug policy, immigration policy, economic policy, almost every policy except that which specifically relates to prostitution, and some aspects of society which are our of the range of any government policy.
2) That said, legalisation is a key component of a policy mix. Everyone in the notorious Other Thread (which was totally going to hell because nobody with any experience or rational argument that wasn’t based on misogyny was left, apparently) stated that they favoured at least decriminalisation, even though the punters were all bastards and the women were all victims.
3) Sweden isn’t perfect. Neither is the Netherlands. In my biased, tool of the patriarchy opinion, I would put the Netherlands’ problem with trafficking down to their schizophrenic attitude towards immigration, and point out that Amsterdam is like Austin as far as being a liberal enclave in a conservative state. Not, obviously, as scarily conservative as Texas, but you get the idea. Sometimes the red states win.
4) Loathe them or not, “happy hookers” are your natural allies in the fight to get abused women off the streets.
5) Studies don’t mean shit.
Or, at least, making sure that there’s Official Documentation that can be used for slut-shaming (cf. the ongoing publicity about the prostitute Spitzer hired, including her real name).
I don’t really see how the “ongoing publicity about the prostitute that Spitzer hired'’ is being used for “slut-shaming” in this case. The young lady is not only an overnight sensation as a singer now–thousands of people are downloading her songs–but she’s also receiving offers from Penthouse to do a photo shoot, and tons of well-wishers are posting sweet notes on her My Space page.
I am sure there are “slut shamers” out there, but they are out to shame whatever deviates from their sick little visions of the world.
i guess i’m just weird. i have this neurotic thing where i’m concerned about my partner 100% doing it because she wants to.
Oh, no, self-absorbedly patting yourself on the back for not being aroused by sexual assault isn’t weird at all. Lots of men aren’t rapists, and lots of them think they deserve medals for it. Sad,but not weird.
Kristof also argued a few years ago that Christian groups were doing more to stop the exploitation of women around the world than American feminists were. It’s stupid to rely on Kristof for your opinions.
And let us examine how Amanda frames the issue:
Romanticizers of prostitution will not be pleased with the facts, so maybe you should just skip over this if your illusions are important to you:
So clearly if you are in favor of legalization, it’s because you “romanticize” prostitution.
She then approvingly quotes Kristof:
One response would be: Prostitution is inevitable, so we might as well legalize and regulate it. That’s a pragmatic argument that I used to find persuasive. If brothels were legalized and inspected, I believed, then we could uproot child prostitution and reduce AIDS and sexually transmitted infections.
Is there anybody on this thread who thinks that prostitution is NOT inevitable? And, does selling underaged girls into marriage count? Do you plan to do something about that? It’s perfectly legal in many places.
Amanda states:
Is there any evidence, anywhere in this thread, presented to support Amanda’s belief? Please let me know, I must have missed it.
And since this is presented as a male/female thing, are we to assume that male/male prostitution should be legislated against (or legalized) as a completely separate thing? In which case, the term “prostitution” doesn’t really work here - there needs to be a term that refers specifically to male customer/female prostitute situations.
Foucault, if you really think that the only communications the young lady is receiving are sweet notes from well-wishers, I have this bridge to sell you. Barely used, in great condition.
And do you really think that prostitutes who didn’t have the luck to get hired by Elliot Spitzer would be receiving *any* positive media attention if their names were publicly available?
Perhaps that’s why Foucault used the phrase “in this case” -
don’t really see how the “ongoing publicity about the prostitute that Spitzer hired’’ is being used for “slut-shaming” in this case.
You do realize that bad treatment of famous females isn’t limited to “slut-shaming” right?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/28/AR2007052801370.html
Nancy, sorry, did you have a point? Because mine was that putting prostitutes’ names on a public registry is just another way to make sure everyone knows who they are.
btw Amanda, your $10 blowjob reference contains a whole bunch of information about how and why street-based prostitutes are abused than maybe a lot of people here realise. The basic unit of sex work (i.e. the cheapest purchasable service) is usually a blowjob from a street-based sex worker. It is this way because street-based workers are freelancers with a drug problem, so their services are pushed down by their desperation. And it just so happens that the cost of this basic unit of sex work is roughly the same in most economies - illlicit or not - as the cost of a basic unit of the standard street drug. The problem is not these women’s prostitution problem but their drug problem. The reason they couldn’t earn $2500 a night like Spitzer’s friend has nothing to do with their particular type of sex work, and a lot to do with their drug problem (and maybe in the US their race).
Sweden’s “success”, what there is, is largely driven by two factors - the ease with which it could crack down on drug importation relative to nations with larger immigration and more complex international trade (i.e., the Netherlands); and the success with which it could push the sex trade to a very close nearby neighbour with more liberal policies about prostitution. If the Netherlands were not a hop-skip-and-jump away, it would be a lot easier to get your child prostitution services in Sweden. And in reality, it is almost certainly extremely difficult in both of those places.
It’s amusing to watch people who support drug decriminalisation on the premise that “if it is illegal, the problem can’t be monitored or controlled” opposing sex work decriminalisation on the basis that it “if it is legal, the problem can’t be monitored or controlled.”
why do sex worker’s names have to go on a registry, and why should it be public? They’re hardly a threat to society, after all.
But Foucault’s argument was case specific. Your argument isn’t with Foucault. In this case.
And women don’t have to be prostitutes to be harrassed - just being in public is often enough. No woman is safe from sexism, whether she’s a prostitute or not. “Slut-shaming” can happen to any of us, whether on the street or on the Internet.
Are you really claiming that prostitutes and former prostitutes aren’t targeted by specific forms of discrimination and harassment that do not affect other women? Not just on the street but from prospective employers, law enforcement, any number of other institutions, due to the particular stigma of sex work? I think most any sex worker would tell you otherwise.
Separate topic…
There’s something I don’t understand about the Amsterdam example. While I think the Netherlands and New Zealand are both testaments to the fact that legalization is not just some kind of panacea that fixes everything right away — there are too many other interrelated problems of poverty, crime, immigration, etc for it to ever work that way — I am not following the logic of the increase in illegal trafficking being linked to the legalization of prostitution.
If the “cleaning up” of legal prostitution creates a shadow market for prostitution where customers can be more brutal, coercive, or dangerous, then wouldn’t we see a split in the market? If most johns are of the latter type — then how can the “clean” establishments stay in business, if very few customers want a clean, safe, worker-controlled encounter? (Please note that I agree that there are a lot of “bad johns” out there — I am just not really convinced how many.)
Furthermore, why would the mere fact of legalization actually prove attractive to criminal elements engaging in illegal forms of prostitution — just because “clean” prostitution is accepted doesn’t necessarily mean that there is less law enforcement cracking down on illegal forms. In fact, you’d think that resources could be more concentrated. There might be any number of reasons it’s not in Amsterdam, like McDuff says, including a shadow-effect off the edge of the legal market. But overall this sounds like one of those War on Drugs arguments: we can’t legalize marijuana, because marijuana is associated with other harder drugs! If marijuana is legal, then cocaine and heroin will be everywhere! There must be something I’m not following in both arguments, because why can’t the two be distinguished and enforced separately again
Are you really claiming that prostitutes and former prostitutes aren’t targeted by specific forms of discrimination and harassment that do not affect other women? Not just on the street but from prospective employers, law enforcement, any number of other institutions, due to the particular stigma of sex work? I think most any sex worker would tell you otherwise.
Separate topic…
There’s something I don’t understand about the Amsterdam example. While I think the Netherlands and New Zealand are both testaments to the fact that legalization is not just some kind of panacea that fixes everything right away — there are too many other interrelated problems of poverty, crime, immigration, etc for it to ever work that way — I am not following the logic of the increase in illegal trafficking being linked to the legalization of prostitution.
If the “cleaning up” of legal prostitution creates a shadow market for prostitution where customers can be more brutal, coercive, or dangerous, then wouldn’t we see a split in the market? If most johns are of the latter type — then how can the “clean” establishments stay in business, if very few customers want a clean, safe, worker-controlled encounter? (Please note that I agree that there are a lot of “bad johns” out there — I am just not really convinced how many.)
Furthermore, why would the mere fact of legalization actually prove attractive to criminal elements engaging in illegal forms of prostitution — just because “clean” prostitution is accepted doesn’t necessarily mean that there is less law enforcement cracking down on illegal forms. In fact, you’d think that resources could be more concentrated. There might be any number of reasons it’s not in Amsterdam, like McDuff says, including a shadow-effect off the edge of the legal market. But overall this sounds like one of those War on Drugs arguments: we can’t legalize marijuana, because marijuana is associated with other harder drugs! If marijuana is legal, then cocaine and heroin will be everywhere! There must be something I’m not following in both arguments, because why can’t the two be distinguished and enforced separately again?
If we legalize, we also must regulate. Which agency gets to set the standards, enforce the policies and procedures, and inspect the merch?
A bureaucracy set up to regulate ‘hos. Why do I feel like a writer for a stand-up comic?
Foucault March 13, 2008 at 10:55 pm
tons of well-wishers are posting sweet notes on her My Space page.”
She erased her MySpace page. She could pull a legit Jennifer Lopez stunt if she wanted and make big bucks.
Men pay them extra to accept the abuse - and the hooker has deliberately made the decision to cater to that as opposed to the larger market for more conventional sex.
Yes, because everybody knows that the most abused sex workers are the highest paid ones.
Did you think at all before typing this? And, no, legalisation doesn’t make a difference to this dynamic– being a porn star is legal but the highest paid ones are not treated worse on camera. Likewise with prostitutes in the Netherlands; the trafficked women are not being treated better or paid more than the legal prostitutes.
This is so obvious, it fucking hurt me to type it. Where there’s a market for abuse, there will be coercion and massive exploitation.
sophonisba: Snarkily attacking a guy who is not turned on by sexual assault will not get you more guys who are not turned on by sexual assault.
Many of us who have penises agree with the broad argument that men have constructed a society that privileges males, and would like to help feminists change this. Criticizing us for saying so will only shut us up.
sophonisba: Snarkily attacking a guy who is not turned on by sexual assault will not get you more guys who are not turned on by sexual assault.
Many of us who have penises agree with the broad argument that men have constructed a society that privileges males, and would like to help feminists change this. Criticizing us for saying so will only shut us up.
sophonisba: Snarkily attacking a guy who is not turned on by sexual assault will not get you more guys who are not turned on by sexual assault.
Many of us who have penises agree with the broad argument that men have constructed a society that privileges males, and would like to help feminists change this. Criticizing us for saying so will only shut us up.
Suppose you go out and count 50 sex slaves and 50 happy hookers. Is this a bang up case that 1 in 2 prositutes have problems? Well no, because if you did five counts over a period of time you could end up counting the 50 sex slaves 5 times each and 5 new sets of 50 happy hookers each time, and then conclude that 1 in 6 prostitutes have problems.
Oh dear. Wouldn’t the finding that happy, empowered women get the hell out of prostitution as soon as possible tell you something about the problematic nature of the industry? And why in an all the hells would it be an invalid, irrelevant finding that 1 in 2 prostitutes working at any given time are coerced? It would at the very least say something about the demand side.
And isn’t the major concern here protecting the vulnerable kidnap and serial rape victims, rather than the johns and the happy hookers with other options?
Finally, has this example of “innumeracy” you refer to actually been published in a specific article? Or are you just trying to look clever? (Hint: it didn’t work)
Squashed, you’re inferring she’s a prostitute because she lives in a casino town and the cops beat her? Talk about victim blaming! Also, talk about a polyanna view of cops.
I completely agree with Nancy that it doesn’t take being a call-girl to become the victim of “slut-shaming.” Look at the young female law students whose names were used abusively on that law school forum; look at Hillary Clinton’s daughter being referred to as “pimped out” when she campaigned for her mother; look at any range of examples and you will see that it doesn’t take being a hooker to be treated like one in the media.
The interesting thing is that our culture both loves and hates the figure of the prostitute. Our ambivalence towards sex is general, but the direction in which that ambivalence gets re-routed is usually case specific. This specific prostitute is good-looking, passionate and articulate about her future goals, she has no kids, and she is very young. If she were older, less attractive, a mother of four, etc… she would probably be treated less favorably than she is being treated by the media. In any case, I hope the good publicity lasts for her.
Sophonisba: Snarkily attacking men who say that sexual assault does not turn them on will not get you more men who get turned on without assaulting their partners.
Many of us who have penises agree with the general feminist point that heterosexual white males have constructed a society that priveliges heterosexual white males, and would like to help change that. Criticizing us for saying so will only shut us up.
Nothing speaks to the level to which my life’s work has failed than to see thread after thread of *men* defending and justifying things they know nothing about in favor of protecting this fragile and paper thin facade of the happy hooker.
What is it that prevents them from hearing what women are saying? They consistently reduce it all to academic debates of “which is worse” and “it’s not that bad, here’s why”.
It’s frigging disgusting to see so much privilege in action.
And while they wax academic, the trouble continues.
I’m disgusted.
Sophonisba: Snarkily attacking men who say that sexual assault does not turn them on will not get you more men who get turned on without assaulting their partners.
Many of us who have penises agree with the general feminist point that heterosexual white males have constructed a society that priveliges heterosexual white males, and would like to help change that. Criticizing us for saying so will only shut us up.
“She erased her MySpace page. She could pull a legit Jennifer Lopez stunt if she wanted and make big bucks.”
She didn’t erase her MySpace Music page. I am still able to view it, and people have left comments as recently as this morning.Not one mean comment…
Sophonisba: Snarkily attacking men who say that sexual assault does not turn them on will not get you more men who get turned on without assaulting their partners.
Many of us who have penises agree with the general feminist point that heterosexual white males have constructed a society that priveliges heterosexual white males, and would like to help change that. Criticizing us for saying so will only shut us up.
Anony: I’m sorry if you think I am not listening to what women are saying, or if you think I don’t think this is a real problem.
I would like to see a solution found that protects women. And I would prefer one that increases the power of women to make choices about their lives. In other contexts, feminists agree: the state should not take agency away from women in the name of protecting them.
Sophonisba: Snarkily attacking men who say that sexual assault does not turn them on will not get you more men who get turned on without assaulting their partners.
Many of us who have penises agree with the general feminist point that heterosexual white males have constructed a society that priveliges heterosexual white males, and would like to help change that. Criticizing us for saying so will only shut us up.
Anony: I’m sorry if you think I am not listening to what women are saying, or if you think I don’t think this is a real problem.
I would like to see a solution found that protects women. And I would prefer one that increases the power of women to make choices about their lives. In other contexts, feminists agree: the state should not take agency away from women in the name of protecting them.
Sophonisba: Snarkily attacking men who say that sexual assault does not turn them on will not get you more men who get turned on without assaulting their partners.
Many of us who have penises agree with the general feminist point that heterosexual white males have constructed a society that priveliges heterosexual white males, and would like to help change that. Criticizing us for saying so will only shut us up.
Anony: I’m sorry if you think I am not listening to what women are saying, or if you think I don’t think this is a real problem.
I would like to see a solution found that protects women. And I would prefer one that increases the power of women to make choices about their lives. In other contexts, feminists agree: the state should not take agency away from women in the name of protecting them.
I think you guys may find, if you look a little closer, that a lot of the women you think are being “trafficked” are actually being smuggled, which is a subtle but important difference.
It suits immigration authorities to call illegal immigrant sex-workers victims of trafficking - they can punish the brothel owners more severely, and it’s a lot easier to deport women when you can claim they were kidnapped in the first place. But the majority of foreign sex workers in countries like Australia and the Netherlands, which have decriminalised sex work, are women doing a working circuit of their region - Asian workers in Australia, Eastern Europeans in the Netherlands. These women may have come into the countries on heartless and vicious contracts, but in general they came knowing what they were getting into, and ready to wait through a year of hard, pitiless work for the chance to earn decent money. Of course, for some reason our resident “expert”, Kristof, from that bastion of women’s rights the NY Times, would prefer these women to be earning 5% of the money they get from prostitution in an Asian sweatshop. I wonder why someone from the NY Times would think that way…?
Also Amanda I would like to take issue with the rather extreme question about whether
which really is a bit mean.
For example, this from an article by Roberta Perkins, one of the original members of the Australian Prostitutes’ Collective, and author of “Sex work and Sex workers in Australia”:
The decriminalisation of sex work has been advocated for almost exclusively by sex workers and feminists, and is the result of at least 20 years of long, hard work in those countries where it has been achieved. It is also part of a rich tapestry of community, union and civil struggles which were going on in those places at the time, a genuine workers’/womens’/black peoples alliance to protect community life from the predations of an increasingly confident conservative establishment. But still a large portion of the feminist movement seems to think it can just brush the lot away, and doom them to the life of shame and cruelty that they experienced in the 80s. If only those people understood a little better the history of the struggle they are showing such scorn!
Please, folks, copying and pasting the same message over and over doesn’t get it out of moderation a second faster. Overnight, I am usually sleeping and unable to clear out the moderation queue on a regular basis. Leave your comment and move on. I’m sorry it sits there for awhile. That’s the price we pay for being carbon-based sleep-needers.
Or this, from the history of South Australian legislation:
“The prostitute as a worker”. There’s one for the few leftists remaining in the feminist movement…
#
4) Loathe them or not, “happy hookers” are your natural allies in the fight to get abused women off the streets.
Okay, this is starting to come off as really disingenuous from you. Nobody loathes happy hookers. What we loathe is using them as the standard idea of what prostitution is like.
5) Studies don’t mean shit.
To repeat part of what I said in the other thread: people have gathered reliable information on rape, domestic violence, child sexual abuse, and other topics that are notoriously under-reported and stigmatized. And sex workers by the nature of their job have to advertise and make themselves public at some point, making them far easier to keep track of than alcoholics, rapists, pedophiles and other people who do things they wouldn’t want others to find out about . So, yes, studies do mean a great deal. They are the only method we have of finding out about anything beyond our own, narrow personal experience. Are they perfect? Absolutely not, but they have to be taken into account.
And in any case, McDuff, “Studies don’t mean shit” really doesn’t help your case. Because embarrassment/unwillingness to talk does not explain why studies would be biased in the anti-prostitution direction, in the sense that they show high rates of abuse. Why, for example, would drug addicted prostitutes be more likely to talk to a researcher than non-drug addicted ones? Why would prostitutes who get regularly beaten by pimps be more likely to talk to researchers, given that it’s probably more dangerous for her to do so?
Frankly, your “studies don’t mean shit” attitude can be used to dismiss all sorts of social problems that don’t actually result in a dead body: rape, battery, child abuse of any kind, etc.
“That’s the price we pay for being carbon-based sleep-needers.”
…so old school…
An organization in Victoria, BC is attempting to run a for-women by-women brothel. They’re called PEERS (Prostitutes Empowerment Education and Resource Society) and they are run mainly by ex-prostitutes. They also do research and community outreach.
One interesting thing from one of their research publications, which might shed some light on some of the wild assumptions showing up in this thread:
Victoria is a town of about 350k, and the social demographics and attitues are likely closer to the US than cases cited from NZ or Australia.
Let’s not leave out the obvious.
Most folks here are busy trying to decide what’s right for sex trade workers. Patronization from the very people who claim they are trying to stop the patriarchy.
I was an outreach worker with sex trade workers at street level.
I also spent some time assisting with “john school”–now that’s a joke. The reason the recidivism rate is so low is that if you put a bunch of johns together they all tell each other the secrets of how not to get busted again. You’d be amazed at what I heard on the smoke breaks when they didn’t know I was there including trading phone numbers for sex, connections abroad and other sundry sordid details.
The obvious solution is to ask the sex trade workers what THEY want to do.
Nothing is going to solve street sex trade. The women are desperate for cash.
How many store cashiers hate their jobs? Well, job satisfaction isn’t high on the list for most underpaid women’s labour so the fact that most prostitutes say they hate their jobs is irrelevant. So do many underpaid women but the customers are not allowed to punch them in the face or choke them.
Most sex trade workers DO have limits on what they will perform for cash and none want to be abused. Yet if they complain about assaults to the police they open themselves up for further degradation. Free sex to cops is a given.
What most people in this country do not know is that it is NOT illegal for a cop to have sex with a prostitute and then arrest her. There are no entrapment laws and the practice is commonplace.
Women have sex with their bosses every day just to keep their jobs. We can’t even solve that problem in this hack N slash of protective social programs.
If we truly want to change prostitution for the sake of the women involved in it, then we have to stop assuming we know what’s best for them and see what creative alternatives the sex trade workers themselves would like to put into place.
Of course, that would mean putting aside all the academic middle-class mindset, moral judgments about paid sex and drug trade by allowing sex trade workers, male and female, voice their own desires. It would mean society not shaming those that come forward in their own lobbies and seeking activist power and be taken seriously instead of sniggering behind hands.
That of course, would mean all the paid activists, social workers and psych professions would have to sit down, shut up and listen.
Not likely but I can dream…
Serafina, this:
just isn’t true in many cases, nor does it have to be. The majority of sex workers work in brothels, not on the street. They work in very private situations, i.e. brothels.
Also, the studies you mention are almost exclusively small samples, often of snowball (not random) samples, usually conducted with street-based sex workers (who have drug problems, usually), often in environments where sex work is highly illegal, by anti-sex-work institutions. Is it any surprise they produce the results they do?
Zoe, your comment is a useful addition to PiatoR’s repeated (and mostly ignored) invocations of the situation in New Zealand. And Australia shouldn’t be dismissed just because flashheart is flippant about trafficking vs. smuggling. Also, in the UK, there’s the International Union of Sex Workers pushing for labor protections, which carries with it at least tacit legal status (UK law is rather complicated in this area). To be fair, the UK-founded International Prostitutes Collective supports decriminalization and legal protections, but opposes “making the state the pimp” via legalization. However, the collective action and decriminalization they advocate would actually address most of their concerns about current legalization schemes.
Unfortunately, much of the argument seems to be overly polarized between “Female prostitution is A-OK, and should be legal” and “Female prostitution is inherently exploitative, and should be illegal.” As I (mostly in vain) tried to point out in the previous thread, legalization and regulation, especially coupled with workers’ collective action, need not be completely at odds with trying to move society in a better direction vis a vis sexuality, gender equality, and economic opportunity. Some of us who advocate legalization would like to protect existing sex workers and eventually reduce their numbers.
And although I understand that some commenters with their “Hey, it’s their choice” and “It’s no big deal” make a really bad (and misogynistic) impression, I nevertheless resent the accusation that I am a “romanticizer of prostitution” because I support legalization, or because I am skeptical of the “facts” of a cherry-picking defender of sweatshop labor.
Zoe: great, but what does that have to do with anything anyone has actually advocated? No one’s advocated making prostitution 100% illegal (as in criminalizing everyone involved in it) and no one has said prostitutes are “mere victims.” They are often victims, but that’s not all they are, and of course they have some degree of control over their work. The question is: what degree, and what level of victimization?
And why do you highlight the “mere victims” section without highlighting the part that talks about health problems that exist even after leaving prostitution?
mds, I am “flippant” about the difference between trafficking and smuggling because the difference is frequently confused and obfuscated by people with a less than pure agenda. Consider this note, for example, or the opinion of the sex worker unions in Australia, which I have posted here several times and which have been repeatedly ignored. “Trafficking” (as opposed to actual trafficking) is the latest US stick to beat third world women with. It keeps them poor and, surprise surprise, forces them into sweatshop labour. Just as our nice NY Times columnist wants.
I would also remind you that it is not flippancy to point out that the majority of illegal immigrant sex workers in countries like the Netherlands and Australia are not trafficked. It is true.
Thomas TSID March 14, 2008 at 6:41 am
Squashed, you’re inferring she’s a prostitute because she lives in a casino town and the cops beat her? Talk about victim blaming! Also, talk about a polyanna view of cops.”
What I am saying, the police thought he can get away beating her up. And that’s probably after knowing something obvious from the record. If the video didn’t get out, she would have been forgotten.
Boy, I made a mess of that, didn’t I.
Sorry.
Serafina: I wanted to bold the whole thing, but that wouldn’t have had the same impact.
Correlation doesn’t equal causation, and I’m not convinced - nor have I seen a convincing case made - that the sex trade alone is responsible for the high levels of PTSD that the Farley study reports. Furthermore, victims of family trauma are more likely than the general population to have PTSD, among other mental illnesses. Can we correlate that with a lack of opportunities in the legitimate labour market? I wonder. Prostitutes struggle with mental health problems after they leave the business, but were they struggling before they started? And why? — bad tricks, bad pimps (na for agencies) … drugs? kids? parents? or the whole schmeel?
You can’t ignore the social frame that the sex trade happens within. Without social support, without labour protection, without power, sex trade workers are going to be victimized more than the general population. Just like any other marginalized group. When they can’t even talk about their job, when they have few supports, when they are made actively unwelcome, is this because of an intrinsic aspect of their job? Or an intrinsic aspect of how society views it? Both? (Also, I’d like to see studies of PTSD levels among illegal immigrants or agricultural workers before I was comfortable even forming an opinion on cause and effect from an unregulated sex trade.)
I get the impression that many people in this thread think that blaming society and not the job “romanticizes” prostitution, which is bullshit. I think that blaming the job and not society is more reflexive than considered. There are questions that need to be asked, about how we relate to each other during commercial interactions, how our bodies are sold for labour (I have harsh carpal tunnel from computer programming; fruit pickers have lifetime back damage), and how money corrupts our agency in these regards, before I make a differentiation to any particular body part and its function in the transaction. Every asshole who is rude to a waitress is doing the same thing as a john who hires a prostitute to degrade her. But there are lots of people who are nice to waitresses. Is waitressing intrinsically degrading?
I think it does a disservice to female sex trade workers, as human women, to treat them as victims of the sex trade who somehow lack the ability to consent. That their choices are constrained I do not deny, and that there is victimization that happens to many of them I do not deny. But removing their agency removes their humanity.
I think we should also work to abolish the following occupations, since severe addiction/drug abuse problems, deviant sexual behavior, and adverse health effects often seem to be associated with each of them:
1) Professional baseball players
2) Chefs
3) Bartenders
4) Waitresses
5) Boxers
6) Police Officers
7) Medical Doctors
8) Lawyers
9) Stock Brokers
10) Super Models
11) Pop Stars
12) Child Stars
13) Rap Artists
14) Politicians
Once again, sorry Amanda. I was not trying to get out of moderation–and was in fact not aware that comments were moderated since they posted for me immediately until early this morning.
I just blamed my bad internet connection and kept trying.
Since I’m the only one with this problem, I must be the only dumbass. It won’t happen again.
Happens to me too, R. Maybe there is a dumbass club. If not, we can start it.
Yeah, it’s happened to me a lot too, although not so much in the past couple of weeks. I don’t think the software is particularly user-friendly in that respect.
Not one mean comment…
Then someone must have erased the one where someone essentially told her to disappear from public view and called her a name that my late night local news refused to repeat. The same local new that had no problems referring to her as a “call-girl” or the entire fiasco as a “sex scandal” not “Governor’s illegal activity”.
Gee, I wonder who might have done that and why. Thats a stumper alright.
“That their choices are constrained I do not deny, and that there is victimization that happens to many of them I do not deny. But removing their agency removes their humanity. ”
This comes off as saying we shouldn’t focus on the exploitive, human trafficking aspect of a huge amount of this “industry”. Acknowleding such exists is dimished by suggesting that saying such removes agency. Being forced into that situation is the removal of agency. No one has said that this isn’t something a woman can’t freely chose - which would be a removal of agency and humanity. But since they are not the vast majority, why should that be the primary focus?
Well, it doesn’t tell you when you’ve successfully posted, or is in a moderation queue, it just bounces you back to the page … where there may or may not be a comment waiting for you. There needs to be feedback to the user… but I don’t know my WordPress.
And I’ll sit here and wait while you find me the quote where I or anybody else in this thread claimed that all prostitutes are like that. I’ve got all day. If you can’t, I’m going to have to go with what I thought before, which is either that you’re pretty much raging against people who aren’t even here and using the people here who disagree with you as surrogates for those who hold unreasonable opinions, or you really do think that anyone mentioning the fact that it’s possible to be a happy hooker is somehow saying “therefore all hookers are happy,” which is a basic failure of logic .
Since you’re so keen on saying “nobody’s saying we should make/keep all prostitution illegal,” perhaps you would do us the courtesy of stopping insisting that we are saying all hookers are living the life of riley and that we shouldn’t do anything to help them out. Deal?
If I was talking about statistics on drug abuse or being beaten by pimps in America, then you’d have a point. Since we’re talking about studies run in Sweden that purport its own policies are working, against some really underfunded organisations saying “hey, here are reasons those numbers might not be so accurate,” I’ll keep being skeptical.
And I’ll reiterate that I think Sweden took a step in the right direction, but that it’s woefully naive to think that their policies have magically solved the problem, or that at least some of their recorded reduction hasn’t just been displaced. There’s nothing wrong with healthy skepticism about numbers in the face of compelling reason to believe in their innaccuracy.
flashheart, you said this:
The majority of sex workers work in brothels, not on the street. They work in very private situations, i.e. brothels.
I think you’re missing my point. My point is that studies can be done, and have been done, to evaluate the lives of prostitutes. If you can find out that the majority of sex workers work in brothels–if the studies telling you that are reliable–then there’s no reason why studies on abuse and violence should not be reliable as well. You can criticize specific studies, but not the idea of studies per se.
Also, the studies you mention are almost exclusively small samples, often of snowball (not random) samples, usually conducted with street-based sex workers (who have drug problems, usually), often in environments where sex work is highly illegal, by anti-sex-work institutions.
This is false. For instance, the Center for Impact Research (a Chicago non-profit working on poverty issues) has a 2001 study (http://www.impactresearch.org/documents/prostitutionexecutive.pdf)
involves samples of up to eleven thousand and including off-street workers. As for your claim that it’s only done by “anti-sex-work institutions,” wouldn’t any institution that did a study showing the sex trade in a negative light automatically become “anti-sex-work”?
Zoe,
First of all, saying that someone’s been a victim isn’t taking away their agency. If the word “victim” offends you, then how about this: most prostitutes have been wronged, more so than people in other occupations. Does saying you’ve been wronged take away agency? Secondly, I really don’t think you can compare waitressing to prostitution for the simple reason that people in general think of sex very, very differently than they do waitressing, and I don’t see that perceived difference going away (nor do I see that it necessarily should go away: destigmatizing prostitutes doesn’t have to mean deciding that sex is just like any other activity).
More importantly, though, I think your distinction between “the job” and “society” is too neat. The job isn’t separable from wider society. It exists in the way it does because we have a certain kind of society that’s set up in a particular way. That context is what makes the job what it is. Maybe in some happy shiny future the only sex workers would be those that are treated like Greek hetairae or Inara on Firefly, and if I lived in that future I’d think of these things differently. But I don’t.
If a new page comes up or your get redirected, that means the form got submitted.
And of course the penalties against men who try to use the services of underage prostitutes should be extremely harsh.
Seraphina, that’s kind of the opposite of what I said. My point was that it is much harder to separate cause and effect than either the pro- or anti- or quasi- arguments are making it sound. And that, if you’re looking only at effect and trying to draw conclusions, then you must consider that the job is situated in a society where commercial transactions are actually already pretty degrading, and you have to take that into account. And none of these studies really investigate psychological causes for going into the sex trade versus, say, drug dealing or stealing or selling a kidney. The studies cited are snapshots of the current situation, and they don’t consider the reasons or motivations for women to get into prostitution - they blame the job itself for women’s mental issues. So, no, it is not that neat. Until these questions are answered, none of us really know what we’re talking about. t
Amanda said:
And this implies that prostitutes are not selling sex, they’re selling their own degradation. I just do not buy this.
Banisteriopsis: The principles of good user interface design dictate that you should give the user something obvious, a message of some sort, whenacknowledging their input. Its like calling customer support and having them hang up on you when they’ve fixed something, rather than telling you they did it first.
If prostitutes are selling their own degradation, I certainly don’t hold it against them. My comments are not, not intended to be, and should never be read as a slam on prostitutes. They are free to sell their own degradation, there is no moral wrong in that, and they should never go to jail for it. But I do and continue to sit in judgment on men who buy it.
Nor will I be cornered into saying prostitutes are stupid. I do think that for a lot of men and women, sex and degradation of the woman are considered inseparable. That’s unfortunate. For some men, you degrade certain women (whores, sluts) by having sex with them, and others less so (wives, fiancees). I think for men who split the difference, that’s what they’re getting—degrading sex with a prostitute, and loving sex with a wife or girlfriend.
Moreover, the only people I ever see take issue with this are academic liberals eager to show off their bohemian bona fides. The rest of America seems to grasp that our nation has a “smack my bitch up” attitude about prostitution. I guess I got the need to show off my bohemian bona fides when I slept in my car in New Orleans once.
“Moreover, the only people I ever see take issue with this are academic liberals eager to show off their bohemian bona fides. The rest of America seems to grasp that our nation has a “smack my bitch up” attitude about prostitution.”
Right, and you would know this how? I think that there is a lot more “smack my bitch up” attitude towards poor, often racialized girlfriends and wives than there is towards prostitutes in America. Even prostitutes have the right to call the police or to leave when there is a bad situation; there is a way out. But for many girlfriends and wives who live with their abusive significant others, there is no way out.
I also think that your gripe against “academic liberals” is bizarre. I don’t know too many academics who support sex workers because we think it is “cool” or “bohemian” to do so. Rather, we view sex worm *as* work. Also, maybe you should take your own advice and speak from the “I” position when you generalize and say that for a lot of men and women, sex and degradation are inseparable.
Try this, “For me, Amanda Marcotte, sex and degradation are inseparable.”
Are you joking? Street prostitutes find themselves the target of serial killers because there is, in reality, little protection for them from law enforcement. Many prostitutes are the abuse victims of their pimps. Sometimes, even, they are also the victims of dv at home from a boyfriend/husband and then from their pimp/john. Your attempt to make this distinction is one reason academics come off really bad in arguments about prostitution.
And thus we end up with comparisons to hamburgers or other meat products. Academics spend so much time trying to strip away all the social meaning of sex in order to argue that prostitution is “just work,” indistinguishable from any other work, that they end up looking completely divorced from reality and hardly allies to the prostitutes who they are not listening to in the first place. Until we acknowledge that, in this culture with its attitude that sex is bestial/degrading for women*, prostitution is not just like any other labor we can make no progress in decriminalizing prostitutes or finding a path toward legalization that seeks elevating the social/legal status of the prostitute, rather than the ease of the johns.
As an academic, it is beyond annoying when I see other academics so abstract an issue that there is nothing to be done but navel gaze while the status quo persists. Sometimes academic inquiry is an exercise in procrastination and a way to avoid actually having to DO something to change society. Chet on the last thread and several others here demonstrate that amply.
*are you seriously suggesting that in the U.S. this is not the case, even after all this time on Pandagon?
It’s interesting to see so many people arguing that sex work is just work — no more degrading than being paid to clean toilets. The law recognizes a number of distinctions between sex and cleaning toilets:
— minors can clean toilets;
— if someone physically forces you to clean a toilet, they will only be criminally liable for the force they use, not for the toilet cleaning act itself;
— the lost value of toilet-cleaning is not accounted for in wrongful death suits;
— failure to ever clean the toilet is not grounds for voiding a marriage;
… and so on. Sex is a fundamental biological process, and sexual autonomy is considerably more important than the freedom to choose not to take a job at WalMart.
I support decriminalization of the prostitute’s side of the transaction, but part of the reason why complete legalization is problematic is that regulation would be nearly impossible. The capital requirements for entering this business are minimal (a body), and no licensing scheme will ever be able to prevent the truly desperate (or exploited) from selling themselves to those johns that are interested in, in Amanda’s words, buying degradation.
Seems like a no-brainer to me.
In retail, customers often make it quite obvious that part of what you are selling is not just books, coffee, etc. but also the “service” of other people not having to bother to treat you like an actual person. Whether it was my cousins’ grandmother not bothering to even look up when I sold her a book or the multitude of customers (usually men) who were offended when I ignored their tired jokes (often pointed at me) instead of stroking their egos, it was made quite clear that the “service” I was selling was not limited to helping people find books.
Certainly, they paid money for the books and would not have paid money just to be rude to me, but quite often being rude was considered an essential part of the package. Several customers made it quite clear that the inability to be rude to me would send them spending money elsewhere. And this was at a bookstore where most of the staff was in college and white.
So it seems like a huge leap of logic to me to assume, given the sexist society we live in and the economic and gender difference between most prostitutes and johns, that the same is not as true or worse when it comes to selling sex as a service.
This doesn’t mean that prostitution is inherently a bad idea, just that when discussing regulation, one needs to keep that in mind. That one is trying to protect workers not just from greedy employers, but from customers who are customers in part because they get to treat the workers like trash.
To go back to an earlier comment
Whether or not johns of any “price level” may have initial motivations that have nothing to do with power trips is not the question. The question is whether or not being a john in the type of system we have now reinforces one’s innate selfishness to a frightening degree and the morality of buying such services when the overall system is as oppressive as it is. We don’t have to prove that johns are acting misogynistically - all of them - any more than we have to prove that whites in America do racist things - all of us. Individuals may be less or more to varying degrees, but that both groups oppress is just a given, given the systems that both groups operate within.
The question then becomes, why would anyone continue engage in such behavior, unless the act of oppressing was part of the appeal? It’s not as if there aren’t lots of more socially acceptable ways for those “higher price level” johns to get sex without partaking of such an overtly oppressive system.
Neither here nor there, just a few more bits of information. Slate, that bastion of radical feminism, has a piece about the economics/lifestyle of very, very high end prostitution (higher end than Spitzer was engaged in). Lot more independence, safety, money for the women but at the end, the author notes that high-end prositutes report abuse at the hands of clients twice a year on average, compared to six times a year for streetwalkers. So better, but given that these women have a lot fewer clients, would indicate at least some significant minority of men who buy sex feel like they then own the woman and can do with her as they please.
Not sure of the authors’ credentials, but seems to have done first-hand research on the topic.
As for slut-shaming, you can always rely on the New York Post.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/03142008/news/columnists/boo_ho__dont_shed_any_tears_for_this_bus_101944.htm
Slate link: http://www.slate.com/id/2186491/
And you would know this, how?
Prostitutes, too, are often poor and ‘racialized’. They’re victims of domestic violence (you think sex workers never have relationships?). They have the same “right” to call the police that any woman does, except of course that they’re engaged in an illegal trade and likely have an adversarial relationship with the police already.
And I’ve heard plenty of people excuse violence and/or harassment of strippers as an “occupational hazard” that they should STFU and take because, you know, the bitches make bank. I can’t imagine the prevailing attitude toward prostitutes is all that much better.
“Certainly, they paid money for the books and would not have paid money just to be rude to me, but quite often being rude was considered an essential part of the package. Several customers made it quite clear that the inability to be rude to me would send them spending money elsewhere. And this was at a bookstore where most of the staff was in college and white.”
Sounds like you had a bad job. But I think that it is very weird to transpose the “degradations” of retail onto other lines of work. Spitzer certainly did not seem to act in a “degrading” way towards his prostitute. He paid for her trip, her luxury hotel room, and her time. I suspect this sort of treatment is the norm on the “high-class” end of the sex trade. Men (or women) are paying to pamper themselves, and not to beat up some poor hooker. I’m sure it made Spitzer feel “good” in some perverse way to be courteous to his call-girls, even or especially when he was such an ass-hat to people who are his equals politically (including his wife, of course).
I don’t want to get involved with history_mom again, although I agree with her basic point that there is a hierarchy in our culture in terms of the types of labor that people perform. That said, however, I am not convinced that prostitution is at the bottom. I think there is a great deal of ambivalence in our culture towards sex work (people glamorize certain porn stars; people leave their FORTUNES to strippers like Anna Nicole Smith; people turn sweet-faced call-girls like Kristen into overnight stars). I can think of a lot more “degrading” jobs (culturally speaking) than prostitution.
Finally, I don’t know who you people have been sleeping with, but several of you certainly seem fixated on the idea that sex and degradation are part and parcel of one package. I think people who think this way tend to degrade themselves mentally or emotionally before anyone else can lay a finger on them. I also think that until we have been prostitutes or known prostitutes (or known men who frequent them) then perhaps we should not be so quick to assume that we know what happens to these people when they meet.
No actually, it was pretty damn normal to good. Which was my fucking point. Have you ever even worked retail? Or maybe you just never get people interrupting your work not to ask for help, but to tell you that your boyfriend must be a lucky man.
….but several of you certainly seem fixated on the idea that sex and degradation are part and parcel of one package
Really? Seems to me like you doth protest too much. I certainly said very little about sex myself. My point is that gender relations are often imbalanced and that people - men especially - have a history of treating women in service jobs like shit to begin with. It defies all logic and basic knowledge of people to think that this is better when it comes to selling sex, which society tends to see as inherently degrading to women.
Foucault @ 216:
simply stunning. Hunt left his fortune to Anna Nicole Smith because he was married to her. Do you really want to argue that “people leave their FORTUNES to strippers like Anna Nicole Smith”? Watch “Pretty Woman” much?
er, the third paragraph should be blockquoted as well.
And obviously, men in service jobs get treated like shit as well. But in my experience, they do tend to get a whole lot fewer people making jokes at their expense and expecting them to laugh along, potentially getting them in trouble with their bosses by monopolizing their time with stuff that has nothing to do with the service/items they are selling, or putting them in the position of having to decide which is the bigger danger - encouraging a potential stalker or getting fired for not making the customer happy.
Random men I’ve never met feel entitled to tell me to smile when they pass me by on the street. Even worse, most normal men I know have a hard time understanding why that’s so sexist. (At least not without a lot of explanation.)
So, yeah, the idea that the ability to not have to treat the person selling you a service like an actual person isn’t part of the appeal of a lot of service industries, especially professions where most of the buyers are male and most of the workers are female is just fucking ridiculous. And that’s before we mix in all the fucked up attitudes society has about women who simply have sex, much less those willing to sell it.
I did not imply that prostitutes are at the bottom of society, but that their social position is deemed a degraded social position. I honestly don’t understand how this point can be in dispute. That fact alone, that our society has fucked up views about sex, makes sex work different than other types of work. Just because a few outliers become celebrities, does not mean that society as a whole does not look down their noses at prostitutes or think of them as degraded or dirty.
And Foucault, as an academic, you should know better than to generalize from your own attitudes and experiences. The equation of sex and degradation is endemic to this culture– otherwise we would not see constant comparisons of breastmilk with urination/feces (as just one example). We have had our disagreements in the past, but I hardly consider you unintelligent and if you are going to criticize Amanda for generalizing from her experience then you ought to take your own advice.
This matches my experience working in bookstores also. But you left out creepy (usually older) guys also using my “service” position to attempt to touch me or make inappropriate sexual comments to me. One man even waved his penis at me after I had answered his question. I cannot imagine that a sex worker would experience less misogyny and sexual harassment than a bookstore employee.
Exactly. My best friend worked as a stripper for only a few months and the stories she told me about how some men would treat them were disgusting. I live in one of the stripper capitals, where you would expect dancing to be “normalized” to some degree, and yet it is also one of the most sexist cities in the U.S. Being legal sex work does not seem to elevate the status of strippers all that much; there still is this prejudice that it is not “honest” work. I can’t imagine why anyone would think legalization would make prostitutes more respectable.
Mickle, I think that many “consumers” (myself included) treat people in retail less pleasantly and respectfully than almost every other sector of the workforce… except perhaps bill-collectors and telemarketers. Retail ranks “higher” than prostitution in terms of social prestige, but it’s a trade-off, I think. There’s also something sympathetic about the figure of the prostitute, whereas I am not sure this is true for retail workers.
Actually, I was just reminded of one of the most shocking and heart-rendering things that I have ever experienced in New York. It was Christmas Eve and I was heading to the post office to mail some presents, when I saw this woman standing on the corner, begging for money. I usually ignore pan-handlers after living here for almost seven years, but this woman had a sign that read “Tired of Prostitution.” I was shocked, and I gave her more money than I would normally give a street person. If someone had been out there with a sign that said “Tired of Retail,” I would have been like, “Fuck you.”
So maybe I will reformulate my original notion that prostitution “ranks higher” than certain types of non-sexual work. Street walking is probably the bottom of the barrel, and maybe this line of work should in fact be abolished because it is unsafe to all parties involved (including young women and men who are not prostitutes but who live in areas of street prostitution). As for the brothels and escort services, so long as it is not slavery or “terms of service” that women do not feel comfortable with providing, then I don’t care: let the people involved decide what they want to do, how much they will accept for payment, and what they will tolerate.
For the record, I dated a former “john” once. He was a very wealthy lawyer and a recovering addict when I met him. It took me a long time to learn that he had been with prostitutes, but he spoke very fondly of them. He seemed to have an easier time (emotionally) dealing with prostitutes than with girlfriends. I found him very immature and sort of childish almost, even though he was a good ten or fifteen years older than I was. He in fact seemed to worship the ground that prostitutes walked on, although he actually seemed to worship any woman who would look at him twice. He was very sweet, insecure, and struggling with a sense of himself. In the end I dumped him for a more confident person, and because I had a sense that he would return to his addiction (which he did). But he was certainly not an abusive person interested in degrading anyone else but himself.
Zoe, you said:
And that, if you’re looking only at effect and trying to draw conclusions, then you must consider that the job is situated in a society where commercial transactions are actually already pretty degrading, and you have to take that into account.
I agree. But I think it’s worth remembering that there are degrees of degradation. Saying “it’s all degrading anyway” is a way of avoiding important differences in degree.
And none of these studies really investigate psychological causes for going into the sex trade versus, say, drug dealing or stealing or selling a kidney. The studies cited are snapshots of the current situation, and they don’t consider the reasons or motivations for women to get into prostitution - they blame the job itself for women’s mental issues.
Actually, yes they do–the CIR studies, for example, deal with how drug addiction is the reason for why quite a few women and girls go into the sex trade. The women and girls start out doing drugs and end up in a situation where whoever controls their supply extorts them for sex.
Mickle: your comments are very interesting, and I hadn’t actually made quite that explicit a connection between prostitution and other “service” industries before. Thanks for that.
“simply stunning. Hunt left his fortune to Anna Nicole Smith because he was married to her. Do you really want to argue that “people leave their FORTUNES to strippers like Anna Nicole Smith”? Watch “Pretty Woman” much?”
He wouldn’t have married her if she wasn’t a stripper. He wouldn’t have even *met* her if she wasn’t a stripper!
And I think that many Americans are fascinated by the PRETTY WOMAN story: the romance of “redeeming” someone, be it a hooker, a serial killer, a guy like Scott Peterson (he killed his racialized wife who was not a hooker, remember), etc…
Also, Americans are caught up in the idea of “distancing” themselves from the notion that they are not in some way exploiting others, or being exploited.
He wouldn’t have married her if she wasn’t a stripper. He wouldn’t have even *met* her if she wasn’t a stripper!
Oh, so stripping is the road to getting a cushy job as trophy wife? Gee, they must have it really easy!
‘Oh, so stripping is the road to getting a cushy job as trophy wife? Gee, they must have it really easy!”
I never said stripping was the “easy road” to anything. All I suggested is that men (and women to some extent) are completely FASCINATED with sex workers. They want to hate them, but end up marrying many of them, or throwing away their careers for them. Meanwhile, their own families get zilch for inheritance, and their daughters and wives are humiliated beyond words when the sh*t hits the fan.
If I were a struggling female musician working in a bar or some other low-wage job, I would be pretty miffed right now that someone who made $1000 an hour screwing people is totally famous, whereas I am still busting my ass mixing drinks for minimum wage plus tips. Do you see my point: sometimes in some cases it becomes socially cool to be a sex-worker?
“He wouldn’t have married her if she wasn’t a stripper. He wouldn’t have even *met* her if she wasn’t a stripper!”
Not the point. People don’t go around “leaving their fortunes to strippers” — strippers sometimes get married. Anna Nicole Smith was a stripper, AND she got married. Not only are you making an overbroad generalization based on her very unique experience, you’re making the wrong generalization.
“Not the point. People don’t go around “leaving their fortunes to strippers” — strippers sometimes get married. Anna Nicole Smith was a stripper, AND she got married. Not only are you making an overbroad generalization based on her very unique experience, you’re making the wrong generalization.”
My point is to challenge the argument that sex-work is *always* degrading to women, and that it *primarily* serves as a forum in which men can abuse women for a fee. My own argument is that *some* men are so turned on by sex work that they fall in love with sex workers and give everything they have to making those women happy.
I am sure this is not true for *all* men who use sex-workers, or for *all* sex workers who use men. I am simply stating that desire is a peculiar thing. Leona Helmsley left her fortune to a dog…
Spitzer and Kristen both have a lot in common: they both honestly can claim to have “had it all and lost it all.” Not everyone can make that claim and mean it. This is perhaps why some powerful (or not so powerful) men identify with prostitutes: the recognition that things are not what they seem to be, that they are not whom they seem to be?
WHY is my comment, responding to Zoe, still stuck in the spam queue? Aargh.
My point is to challenge the argument that sex-work is *always* degrading to women, and that it *primarily* serves as a forum in which men can abuse women for a fee. My own argument is that *some* men are so turned on by sex work that they fall in love with sex workers and give everything they have to making those women happy.
You have no evidence to support the contention that “some” men fall in love with sex workers and give everything they have to making them happy (as opposed to feeling “fascination,” which can co-exist with the urge to degrade and abuse, and does not imply a concern for happiness). At most, you have evidence that one man did so. Someone as famous as Anna Nicole is, frankly, a freak occurrence, and you can’t judge social trends on her life.
#
Spitzer and Kristen both have a lot in common: they both honestly can claim to have “had it all and lost it all.”
Well, no. Spitzer had it all. I don’t see that Kristen did.
This is perhaps why some powerful (or not so powerful) men identify with prostitutes: the recognition that things are not what they seem to be, that they are not whom they seem to be?
What makes you think they identify with prostitutes? Or that they see prostitutes as enigmatic figures who are not what they seem to be? I see nothing to support either contention.
Foucault,
The fact that you can find an individual sex worker whose experience was not terrible does not eliminate the basic problems with sex work. As the Slate article points out, even the high end prostitutes in Venkatesh’s sample reported being the victims of violence on average twice a year.
Put another way, your argument that sex work is not *primarily* about the ability to exercise degrading power over another human being is dependent on your ability to point out significant counterexamples. The best you could come up with was a former stripper who was treated as a national punchline, a call girl who the AP has reported is hiding from the press and public in an undisclosed location, and unnamed porn stars who have been “glamorized”. If you can’t come up with better examples, don’t you think there might be a problem with your argument?
“Well, no. Spitzer had it all. I don’t see that Kristen did.”
Kristen/aka Ashley wrote that line about having it all and losing it all on her MySpace page, so obviously *she* felt that she had once “had it all and lost it all.”
The “all” clearly depends on one’s perspective. I don’t know what Kristen had before she became a prostitute, although she apparently had a Porsche at one point according to the NT Times.
In terms of “identifying” with prostitutes, my ex-boyfriend who had been with prostitutes did in fact seem to identify with such women. Or rather, he spoke with amazement about how he had ended up hanging out with prostitutes. It wasn’t disparaging like, “How could someone as nice as me end up doing drugs with scum like her?” It was more bewilderment, this genuine sense of surprise that he had lost everything, and that despite his education and his illustrious career, his nights were spent with dealers and hookers. There was an identification/recognition that was a sad one, but not a disrespectful one.
“The fact that you can find an individual sex worker whose experience was not terrible does not eliminate the basic problems with sex work. As the Slate article points out, even the high end prostitutes in Venkatesh’s sample reported being the victims of violence on average twice a year.”
I wonder how many times a year bouncers are the victims of violence? Or what about professors and students (there’s been a spree of violence on campuses lately). Or what about taxi drivers?
Taxi drivers are routinely killed for an evening’s work.
The world is a dangerous place and bad things happen all the time. I bet a prostitute is probably much “healthier” in terms of STDs than the 1 in 4 American teenagers who are running around with HPV and Chlamydia and other dangerous diseases. But they’re not hookers, so why should we try to abolish *their* sexual activity, right? Give me a break: leave the sex to adults who wear condoms.
Which is around about the same as a 24 hour convenience store clerk, or a train guard. Can we therefore assume that even those people in convenience stores at midnight who *aren’t* holding it up are thinking about it? Or might this be a fraudulent extrapolation.
Here’s a radical idea: perhaps men who get their kicks from preying on weak and vulnerable women target the most weak and vulnerable women they can find. And perhaps the most weak and vulnerable women in our society are often found wired on smack on a street corner trying to sell themselves. Hmm, I don’t know, because if that were the case that wouldn’t be good grounds to extrapolate from there to the thoughts of all punters. And yet it seems so initially reasonable…
Incidentally, something that’s been bothering me.
Are you, I wonder, actually insinuating that I hate my friends?
tSo let’s have a sex worker tell it.
But I’ll wager that just about any form of harrassment or discrimination visited on a prostitute can be matched by women who were not prostitutes at the time they were harrassed etc.
Misogyny is rampant. Expressing misogyny against a prostitute is not all that special.
“Which is around about the same as a 24 hour convenience store clerk, or a train guard. ”
Ok, I’ll bite: do you have a citation for this? Not necessarily something scholarly, but a newspaper article, etc.? That seems very, very high. You’re talking about 2 assaults per year for each of America’s several hundred thousand convenience store clerks.
Do you have any proof to back up your comparative claim that every high class escort is assaulted twice a year?
Why don’t you just admit that you don’t have a valid argument proving that there is any correlation between violence against women, and sex work?
“Taxi drivers are routinely killed for an evening’s work…. The world is a dangerous place and bad things happen all the time.”
Actually, they aren’t, its not, and they don’t. In 2006, 47 of the nation’s 282,000 taxi drivers, livery drivers and chauffeurs were killed on the job.
http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/CFOI_Rates_2006.pdf
The statistic of 2 assaults per year on average for high end New York sex workers came from the Slate article cited above. Sudhir Venkatesh, (the author,) is a sociologist at Columbia who specializes in underground economic transactions.
Josh K, here’s my citation: I know a woman personally who works collecting tickets at a railway station. People regularly (though infrequently) stubbed out their cigarettes on her hand, before smoking was banned.
I don’t think you can seriously challenge the claim that train guards, people who work in bars, and store clerks, aren’t subject to regular and serious abuse or threats of same. In the case of many of these people it is only their status as legal workers, and the extensive security apparatus that surrounds them, which protects them from more severe abuse. How many times do you go into a corner store run by an Arab, Vietnamese or Indian shop worker and see them copping a vicious mouthful, or at the least a kind of continuing sly degradation?
I see a lot of the same kind of circular arguments against prostitution here which arise in conservative christian arguments against sex before marriage. “Those poor women are discriminated against because society looks down on them, so we should protect them by banning the practice”. In fact we should protect them by combatting the cause of discrimination.
As for the idea that men pay for prostitutes so they can treat them like trash: do the readers here seriously believe that sailors coming off a ship at port, men on oil rigs, transient workers, salesmen who travel a lot, tourists in town for a week, and football teams on an away game are really actually paying for anything except sex? Do you really believe it’s about anything else?
serafina, that study you linked to says nothing about the psychological problems of sex workers, just the number. It also gives some evidence that sex work in the US is completely differrent to sex work in countries like Australia and the Netherlands where it is decriminalised. The claim that 60-100% of women in treatment have exchanged sex for drugs is particularly disturbing - in Australia, which has a serious heroin problem, that proportion is much lower. However, I don’t think that the discussion we’re having here generally concerns the 11500 women in that study who swapped sex for drugs - I think it is focussed on a narrower definition of prostitution, and I doubt you’ll find anyone here either defending the practice of drug-sex swaps, suggesting it represents a woman’s “choice”, or arguing that anything can be done to stop it. People here who are defending the decriminalisation of prostitution are talking about swapping sex for money by choice.
As I have tried to say here many times, the US experience of sex work is not the norm, particularly in the developed world - the US, with its extremely poor social services, harsh war on drugs, and high levels of poverty and homelessness, provides a very different environment for prostitution to other countries. You lot need to get out more. Or at the very least, you need to separate the issue of sex work from the economic problems society in which it is practiced.
flashheart,
not trying to diminish your friend’s experience, but I’ve worked in both bars and as a cashier. I’ve never been assaulted or threatened on the job. I’ve never known any of my friends or co-workers to be threatened or assaulted on the job. We can all pick out the individual pieces anecdotal evidence that support our point.
I’m sorry if I’ve made it seem like I’m arguing that prostitution should be criminally punished; not trying to argue that at all. But I do believe something like the Swedish system of criminalizing johns is needed. A legalization of prostitution that tries to regulate the supply of labor is not going to work because it’s just too easy to get into the labor pool.
And yes, I do believe that men patronizing prostitutes is about something other than sex. I live in Minneapolis; we have no sailors on shore leave, no oil rig workers, very little migrant farm work, and very few football players. A brothel was being run out of the building next to ours until 2 or 3 months ago; a neighbor called the police after she observed over 40 men going into the apartment in one afternoon. I think it’s unrealistic to think that these men, (and all of the others like them,) were outsiders from somewhere else.
“A brothel was being run out of the building next to ours until 2 or 3 months ago; a neighbor called the police after she observed over 40 men going into the apartment in one afternoon.”
This sounds like moralistic folklore. “Oh, the forty eager pricks lined up on the porch… there was a line going halfway round the block! They were selling tickets to stand in line…”
I find it hard to believe that 40 men could fit into an apartment. And what exactly are you suggesting that these forty men were looking for in that apartment, if not sex? Maybe they all came over to say degrading things to the sex workers? Maybe they were planning to gang rape the staff? Maybe they came to paint the house?
You’ve basically proven the point that most everyone is trying to make: a) we all have our little anecdotes to back up our preferred world views and b) men frequent brothels because they want to buy sex.
Josh K, I actually don’t think the level of physical risk involved in decriminalised sex work is very high, and the Australian experience generally supports that view, I think. However, I don’t care about the issue so much either, in the sense that if women are to be allowed, even encouraged, to take on physically risky jobs like soldiering, boxing, police work etc. then it should not be a barrier to participation in sex work. The issue of physical risk is very important as a workplace safety issue for sex workers, but as a reason to ban or criminalise the job it is a red herring. People who cite the physical risk while supporting women’s entry into other dangerous jobs do so from a prior belief that sex work is special.
The reason the Swedish system has had some “success” is actually not what you might think. Sweden has a physical border with very few countries and has low immigration, but is right next door to a nation with very liberal laws on sex work, high immigration, and borders with several large transit countries. Sweden has pushed its drug and sex work problems next door, and its policies would be a lot less successful if Amsterdam weren’t right next door taking up the slack.
Do you believe those 40 men who went in to your neighbours house in one afternoon were all different to sailors, oil rig workers and touring football players in any substantive way? Do you think they all went in their to purchase degradation? Why should we start the conversation about their motives by assuming they are deviant for being willing to pay money for sex?
Serafina:
Interesting, because the study I cited from PEERS indicates exactly the opposite.Amanda:
I don’t deny that American culture advocates a “smack my bitch up” attitude about women, but I don’t see any evidence that it is necessary to the sex trade, nor is it nearly as prevalent as many people think. And, in addition, I can’t even count the usual ways we degrade women who are in poverty and women who in any way own themselves overtly… and I see our views of prostitution in North America in general as just an small, but picturesque, extension of this. Most men don’t want to degrade prostitutes any more than they want to degrade any other women. And it wasn’t to establish my bonafides that I worked in the sex trade for a few years; I just needed the money for rent.b) men frequent brothels because they want to buy sex.
No, we haven’t agreed on that. That’s like assuming that you go to a B&N or Borders just to buy a book, even though you could just as easily order one from Amazon.
Whether it’s the experience of walking among stacks and stacks of books, or the ability to get live human help, people go to bookstores now for things other than being able to walk home with a book.
When it comes to prostitution, human interaction, not just orgasm or the act of sex itself, is a huge part of the equation. You can argue all you want that the opportunity to treat people like shit isn’t a fundamental part of the motivation, but it just doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t fit with how people act elsewhere.
A customer may believe with every fibre of their being that they are walking into my place of work because they want a real live person to help them, but that just isn’t true. Society has defined that interaction in a way that is extremely disrespectful toward the person providing the service. That means that, whether you want it to be true or not, almost every single person is walking in to my store in part because it gives them the opportunity to act as if they were nobility and I was a serf. My own family - myself! - included.
Since people are complicated, you can’t really separate that desire from our less selfish wish to simply have someone help us or our preference for browsing books rather than web pages. Even if the latter is the primary initial motivation for walking into a physical store, the fact that one can treat the staff like absolute shit and get away with it is a part of the cost/benefit analysis we all go through when deciding whether to go to an online or a physical bookstore. Over time, it becomes a bigger part of the motivation, but also a more silent one. One that we don’t even question because we can’t even imagine acting any other way.
As I said before, we aren’t arguing that all of these men are knowingly looking for a chance to feel better about themselves by bullying others. That would be like arguing that all the men who order me to smile are aware of what jerks they are being. I have enough faith in men to believe that if they were aware of this, at least most of them would cease doing so.
We are simply pointing out that being a john in our current culture reinforces one’s innate selfishness to a frightening degree. And does so in a way that also reinforces the patriarchy.
I’m undecided as far as what government involvement would be best, but I can promise you that the decriminalization arguments that amount to asserting that johns are even less sexist than society as a whole do nothing to make me think that we should stop prosecuting johns.
Mickle, I go to bookshops to buy books. Period. I treat the staff according to my natural level of courtesy, no more or less, according to my mood and how they treat me - just as with anyone else I meet.
I don’t see any decriminalization arguments based on “asserting that johns are even less sexist than society as a whole”. The arguments are based on two very simple claims:
a) commercial sex transactions are not in essence any different than others, but even if they were (i.e. regardless of one’s position on the moral dimension of commercial sex)
b) commercial sex is a safer, and more easily controlled industry, when it is legal.
Do you support needle/syringe programs, methadone treatment and the decriminalisation of drugs? The arguments are exactly the same. I gather that a lot of Americans don’t understand the concept of harm reduction, but if you do there is really no reason to not extend it to prostitution. And if you don’t understand harm reduction, well again - you need to get out more. I suggest you start by reading some of the links I posted above, or doing a bit of online fossicking into exactly who drove the decriminalisation of sex work, and why.
flasheart,
Sorry if I was unclear about where my last point was going. The thing that all of your examples had in common is that they’re all men on the road, which is one of the classic tropes about johns. The suggestion is that men buy sex because they’re separated from their significant others or from communities in which they have opportunities for sexual relationships.
What the example from my neighborhood (I think) underlines is that it’s unrealistic to believe that that much traffic is supported by traveling salesmen, visiting athletes, tourists, sailors, etc.
If most johns are local, any explanation of why men buy sex has to take into account the fact that they’re buying it close to home. If separation from communities in which they could develop sexual relationships isn’t the reason they buy sex, then why do they behave differently than the majority of men who don’t buy sex?
There will undoubtedly be lots of reasons, Josh, but buying the right to treat a woman like trash is not the only one. Not being able to get a root when you want to, or wanting to have sex without forming a relationship, are two obvious ones that spring to mind. Why fuss around with complex explanations for the obvious?
When it comes to prostitution, human interaction, not just orgasm or the act of sex itself, is a huge part of the equation.
From here:
“Most people would be surprised to learn that with 75 per cent of jobs, the girl never ended up having sex with the client. Some clients just wanted to talk, while others were content with a massage or spa.”
You can argue all you want that the opportunity to treat people like shit isn’t a fundamental part of the motivation, but it just doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t fit with how people act elsewhere.
From the same article:
“Clients ranged from 18 to 80 and came from a mix of backgrounds. Many were married, or in long-term relationships.
“It’s men looking for a bit of variety. In some cases we help spark up relationships which have gone a little stale. It’s not our place to judge whether the guys are married or not,” Lacey said.
“That said, there’s definitely some sick puppies out there who request all sorts of bizarre things. You wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve seen, or been asked to do.”" […]
“”It’s not always about the sex. There are other ways men like to be satisfied,” Lacey said.
Some people also had the view that working girls catered for only the desperate and dateless, Lacey said. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
During the day, the club catered mostly for retirees and businessmen looking for “a physical release” after a long boozy lunch. During the evening the club attracted a wide range of age groups, from young partygoers to labourers and executives.”
Flashheart,
I (like everyone else on this thread) do not support the status quo in America, but I would need compelling evidence to believe that sex work in Australia is a completely different animal to sex work here. I have yet to see such evidence, and believe me, I’ve looked.
You also say that you’re focusing on a “narrower definition” of prostitution than the drug-swap for sex, or other abuses that take place. I say that “narrower definition” is limited and flawed: if drugs-for-sex trades aren’t prostitution, then what are they? And what makes you think they’re so uncommon?
I support some form of decriminalization (like everyone else in this conversation), so you’re not arguing with me when you criticize the American system. But I also support looking facts in the face and recognizing serious harms where they exist. I don’t think it’s either necessary or desirable to minimize the harms of prostitution in the name of decriminalization.
Zoe,
I suspect that one reason the PEERS study doesn’t include girls pimped out by drug suppliers is, frankly, that they’re a hard sample to find talk to unless you’re a rooted member of the community and most people wouldn’t even think to look for them (thinking instead of prostitution as sex for cash). This suspicion is supported by the fact that the PEERS study sample size is quite small–201 respondents–and so would not be likely to get a full picture of the range of prostitution. Also, I think it’s interesting that the majority of PEERS study respondents reported violence and abuse on the job, and that johns were the most commonly reported perpetrators: that has some bearing on the johns’ motives and attitudes, which we’ve been discussing. And no, I don’t think johns abusing the prostitutes is a problem caused by criminalization. At most, decriminalization would make it easier for prostitutes to report problems to the cops, which is great, but lets not kid ourselves that it will end the abuse. I also think it’s interesting that the vast majority in that study tried to get out but were pushed back through economic desperation: that definitely points to the need for direct aid to these sex workers.
Damn tags.
Spam queue strikes again!
don’t deny that American culture advocates a “smack my bitch up” attitude about women, but I don’t see any evidence that it is necessary to the sex trade, nor is it nearly as prevalent as many people think.
No one’s arguing that it’s necessary to the sex trade, but it’s undeniable that it’s more common and accepted in the sex trade, that everyone from police to johns to your average person reading the newspaper thinks a “murdered prostitute” is somehow in a different category from a “murdered woman.” Nobody’s arguing that the sex trade is unique in essence, just in degree.
Of course, desperately poor women and girls are often abused and exploited by their communities even if they’re not prostitutes. But often that’s because they are often regarded as future prostitutes as that’s a likely fate for them, and also because the Madonna/whore dichotomy corresponds rather neatly with class divisions. And being a prostitute does up the likelihood of assault for these poor women as well.
I don’t think it helps in any way for those of us who are not involved in sex work to blather away about the problems faced by prostitutes. If you want to do something, go join a community outreach group, or give a prostitute a job and a place to live.
Don’t waste my time with arguments based on your personal intuitions about how sex work might be exploitative based on your negative retail experiences or your neighbors’ brothel.
Of course prostitutes are murdered and assaulted. I am not denying that. I am saying that legalizing prostitution and treating it as what it is–a professional and useful interpersonal service–will improve conditions for both men and women. You don’t have to like johns or prostitutes to agree that they have a right to engage in transactions that provide each side with something that satisfies their immediate needs.
Of course prostitutes are murdered and assaulted. I am not denying that. I am saying that legalizing prostitution and treating it as what it is–a professional and useful interpersonal service–will improve conditions for both men and women. Y
It’s not a “professional and useful service” - that’s buying into the same attitude that Amanda was criticising with her comments about the assumption of the happy hooker majority. It damages a lot of the people doing it, probably due to necessary emotional disassociation.
“It’s not a “professional and useful service” - that’s buying into the same attitude that Amanda was criticising with her comments about the assumption of the happy hooker majority. It damages a lot of the people doing it, probably due to necessary emotional disassociation.”
We might argue that many occupations damage people emotionally, but we still agree to recognize them as legitimate career choices. One could certainly argue that Brittney Spears and the Olsen twins (not to mention Heath Ledger) have been damaged by their performance careers due to “emotional disassociation” and substance abuse. However, we still support actors’ guilds and the right for actors to professionalize themselves. We don’t blame their brushes with death on their occupational choices and occupational stress, but rather on their own lifestyle choices (ie: addiction).
Any less for prostitutes is just some lame excuse to keep sex-work at a level “below” those at which we exist. People want to distance themselves from sex workers, which is why they make up lousy excuses about how this work is “special” and “more damaging” than other forms of work. The fact is that it has been around for ever and will continue to be around till the world ends because people want to sell sex, and people want to buy sex. It should be treated like any other service.
Foucault, in the last 100 posts or so, you have:
— claimed that everyone who has problems with prostitution finds sex degrading;
— claimed that “Kristen” is on her way to a recording contract;
— claimed that an offer for “Kristen” to pose in Penthouse is empowering;
— claimed that sex workers have better options than abused spouses and girlfriends because they get better responses from police;
— treated us to 3!!! posts on your ex-boyfriend who worshipped the prostitutes he bought sex from;
— claimed that many jobs are more socially degrading than sex work because “people leave their FORTUNES to strippers like Anna Nicole Smith”, and because “people turn sweet-faced call-girls like Kristen into overnight stars”
— claimed that there is no correlation between violence against women and sex work;
— claimed without evidence that sex work is no more dangerous than driving a taxi, and then ignored the arguments raised by the Sudhir Venkatesh article once it became clear to you that it was actual research by a sociologist.
At every stage in this thread you have raised ridiculous arguments based on bizarre cherrypicked anecdotes. When confronted with facts you have retreated to new and equally ridiculous positions. And now you want to frame the disagreements in this thread as people “[wasting] my time with arguments based on your personal intuitions about how sex work might be exploitative based on your negative retail experiences or your neighbors’ brothel.”
Come fucking on.
Josh K, I won’t bother to read your post. Of all the people who have posted here with pathetic arguments, you take the cake.
Admit it: you just want to tell women what to do. I hope your neighbors open up their brothel again just to bug you.
What about pimps, in the Swedish system?
(sorry if that’s already been asked)
“I hope your neighbors open up their brothel again just to bug you.”
Well, that’s gonna be hard because:
a) they moved off our block; and
b) unless there were two middle-aged Chinese immigrant couples running brothels in my neighborhood last Fall, they’ve been federally indicted for trafficking human beings for the purposes of prostitution. (see below)
http://www.startribune.com/local/west/12523281.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/us/17brothel.html?_r=2&ref=us&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
I recommend the Times article; it has lots of good info on the freedom of contract the sex workers enjoyed.
If they do move back in, I’ll be sure to stop by and let the women know that somewhere out there on the internet, you’re defending their right to choose sex work.
Serafina, I have been posting evidence of the situation in Australia. I recommend you read “Sex work and sex workers in Australia”, read the parliamentary commissions, visit the websites of the Australian sex worker unions, and read the relevant research. I have been a researcher in Australia, studying HIV, Harm Reduction and sex worker health for the last 10 years, and I can assure you that things are very different there. Sex workers are much safer than in the time when sex work was illegal, they earn real money, they have a union and workplace safety, and - believe it or not - most Australian sex workers are free of the predations of pimps and vicious clients most of the time. They even get compensation for workplace injuries, and can claim deductions on their tax. Many feminists may think its unsavoury that the industry can operate openly, but this is the essence of harm reduction: putting aside your moral objection to the practice in order to ensure it is done safely, if you think it is widespread and involves consenting adults.
I am particularly offended by Amanda’s suggestion that sex work decriminalisation is not driven by the interests of sex workers. It is ignorant of the history of the issue and the economics and politics of sex work. The real sex worker abusers - their pimps, the violent johns and the anti-woman christian right - benefit much more from its illegality, which is the main reason for its decriminalisation. I would have thought this was Feminism 101, but maybe Feminism 101 has become so middle class that the theory is now part of Public Health 101 instead.
I also restrict my definition of prostitution to “sex for cash” because:
a) you can never control sex for service swaps, since they will always be invisible
b) the problem with sex for drugs swaps is much more on the drugs side of the equation than the sex work side - these women would engage in sex for money if they could, and neither type of work if they could, but their drug habit and economic situation forces them to these straits, not the sex work itself
c) once you start including sex for service swaps in your discussion of sex work, why stop at drugs? This inevitably takes one down the road of arguing that stay-at-home-wives are prostitutes, which may be theoretically interesting but practically is both irrelevant and politically destructive.
We’re talking here about things we can decriminalise, not nebulous relationships between the most disadvantaged in society and their abusers. Big problem, but a different issue, and dependent on factors other than sex work - factors like poverty, race and drug abuse which are much worse in the US than in Australia.
Josh K, a couple of points about the article and your friendly neighbourhood brothel:
1) just because the contract was harsh doesn’t mean the women didn’t agree to it. They may have been offered a year of indentured service, for example. In the 90s in Australia this type of contract was common, with women having to work for nothing for a year to repay their smuggler. After this time they could work for real money, and a lot of women were willing to endure this first year for the lure of the second. These arrangements are unpoliceable because the women are illegal immigrants - they can’t exactly take their employer to court for breaching the contract conditions, so are dependent upon the employer’s goodwill, which doesn’t always follow. Generally of course (present company excepted) opponents of the decrminalisation of sex work are also “strong” on immigration, doing their bit to ensure these women stay under the radar.
2) the conditions under which they worked were similar to sweatshops in many western countries, and in China as well, though the pay was probably considerably more
3) in Australia, brothels like this can’t set up very easily anymore, because the council can investigate anywhere they suspect might be a brothel. But if a legitimate brothel tried to set up near your house, they would need to apply for planning permission, and you could object to their presence and/or enforce conditions. And of course, they would be subject to all the rules governing brothels - union and health inspections, occupational health standards, legal age requirements for workers and their clients, etc.
On 1), I would like to point out that when women come to a western country on a contract like that, though it may seem very cruel to us, to them it is possibly the best ticket out of poverty they will ever receive. Assuming their employer keeps to his word (which many do) these women earn nothing for a year, but then they get to work as hard as they want for $40 an hour. In a Chinese sweatshop (the main alternative work for uneducated rural Chinese women) they would earn maybe 50 cents an hour. Sure, they don’t earn anything for a year but in the first week after they are free from their contract they earn as much as they did in a year in China. Is it any wonder these brothels have a steady supply of willing workers? Bear in mind too that a lot of these women previously did sex work in China, where the conditions are nowhere near as good as in Australia.
But our “pro-woman” opponents of sex work want to ensure that this option is never legally available to these women, and force them to slave 12 hours a day locked away in sweatshops in China. Conveniently our “pro-woman” anti-sex-work campaigners get cheap clothes out of this deal, but they don’t get any benefit from immigrant sex work. I wonder why ever Nicholas Kristof would be pro-sweatshop and anti-sexshop?
Nor of course, do you see them supporting the kind of initiatives which would improve those women’s working conditions in China and reduce their incentive to join the sex trade. Good bedfellows for feminism, surely.
The other reason I would like to see sex work legalized is (hopefully) to cut out the pimp, or the middleman. If sex work becomes legal, then hopefully this will enable more sex workers to take control of their inventory and sell it in ways that are most convenient for them. They will be able to go without fear onto the Internet and advertise, or take out ads in the Yellow Pages, or whatever other forms of publicity they choose.
Secondly, if sex work becomes legal, then more and more people who might otherwise not enter into sex work (as owners, managers, financiers) etc… will do it. And when a more respectable and affluent class of people gets involved with the management of sex work, then hopefully this will drive out the riff-raff who abuse or coerce women.
Everything I’ve read indicates that it is predominantly pimps who abuse and degrade prostitutes, not the johns. So get rid of the pimps by legalizing prostitution. or get rid of the need for sex workers to depend on pimps for work.
sadly foucault, the experience in Australia has been (anecdotally, based on court cases I have read about in the media) that “higher class” people don’t improve the industry. We have had union reps and “left wing” politicians busted for running child prostitutes out of their brothels. There is no protection against The Evil That Men Do except strong civil society. It’s a strong argument for decriminalising sex work, but no panacea for the ills of humankind.
After having read through all of this stuff from the past two days since my last post, two things become obvious.
First, I see little, if any, direct evidence from ANYONE about what the lives of strippers and prostitutes is actually like. Everyone is using anecdotal “evidence” to support their points - evidence which in many cases has been demonstrated to be biased (on both sides). As someone who’s been a dancer for almost four years, (admittedly in an upscale club), I can assure you the vast majority of dancers are not victims of abuse, incest victims, pimped out, etc. Some are drug addicted, sure. But then so are a huge number of people who work in many other industries. Some have been abused, sure. But then so have a huge number of people who work in many other industries. These are not reasons to keep sex work illegal.
I have two friends who work as escorts to put themselves through school, and in conversations with them about their work, NEITHER of them has EVER had a situation where a client was abusive of them. My interviews with prostitutes who work in brothels in Nevada also turn up only two of them who say they’ve had customers who mistreated them and in both cases, they terminated the session and had the customers escorted out. My experience interviewing escorts in the Miami area resulted in similar findings. Now, streetwalkers on the other hand, almost invariably suffered abuse - I’m not suggesting that they don’t, nor would I advocate that as a legal approach to providing prostitution services.
Second, people are using the fact that clients might abuse the sex workers, treat them badly, degrade them, coerce them into the work, etc., as a supposed justification for keeping prostitution illegal. Abuse and degradation happens in a great many jobs, yet I don’t see anyone suggesting we outlaw those jobs as well. It is already illegal to coerce someone into any line of work, so that’s not even an issue here.
NO ONE has come up with any legitimate, rational basis for overriding someone’s decision about entering prostitution as a line of work if they choose do it of their own free will (regardless of what that decision is based on). Sure, some will make the decision based on faulty reasoning. But again, that happens with just about every job on the planet. I find it ironic, actually, that many of you who advocate the fact that people should be able to choose what they want to do in life would argue against women having or exercising the choice to go into sex work. Just because you personally find it degrading or want to believe that all men are out to abuse the women (I’m not even sure where that assumption comes from) does not make it so.
You’d be better served to actually ask those who work in the industry about their positions on the matter (and actually listening to them, rather than just picking the few that will agree with your point of view (like Ms. Farley does), rather than ranting on ad infinitum about matters with which you have no direct experience. They’d be in a far better position to make the decisions about how to approach this. To that point, almost all major sex workers’ rights organizations are in favor of legalizing the industry. I think that speaks volumes about the subject.
Given the appropriate regulation and oversight of the industry, there’s not any reason why legalized prostitution could not be as legitimate as any other service industry. The key, of course, is ensuring that the regulation is done to protect both sides of the transaction and the industry itself and not to serve someone’s political agenda or to benefit one party over the other unnecessarily. That is probably impossible in today’s political climate, however. Would perfect regulation result in a wholly satisfying experience for all involved? Of course not. But then, there is no such industry.
The fact of the matter is that prostitution has always been around, and it always will be around. We owe it to those who work in the industry to legitimize them as human beings and recognize the work that they do, and to protect them. Legalization and regulation may not be the panacea that some believe it would be, but it would represent a much fairer and safer approach than leaving them at the mercy of the situation they’re in today. If you truly believe what many of you espouse – that sex workers are human beings who deserve the full benefit of that and that they should have the right to live a decent, respectable life with everyone else – then we owe it to them to make it as safe as possible. With respect to that, legalization wins out against leaving it illegal easily.
I’m in total agreement with Caitlain. And I also agree with flashheart that a strong civil society is perhaps the greatest protection against the evils of individual human scum.
As for the people who constantly inflect their silly arguments with morality (why *wouldn’t* it be a great financial arrangement and awesome publicity for the young woman in question to have Penthouse pay 1 million dollars for a naked photo shoot!!??), you have evidenced your own incentives for protesting the legalization of sex work.
You don’t care about women: you just don’t want women making more money than you for things that you are not personally hot enough to do.
Flashheart, I don’t deny that there is some decrease in violence post-decriminalization–that’s why I’m for decriminalization. What I deny is that the nature of the business changes, that violence and desperation and drugs stop being a serious factor. There is zero evidence for that, and yes, I’ve looked. And I treat drugs as distinct from being a housewife because being a drug addict interferes with your physical brain and your ability to make choices in a way that marriage does not. Marriage may restrict your choices, but it doesn’t directly alter your body and brain chemistry and physically prevent you from getting out. Furthermore, the conditions of being a housewife are very, very different from the conditions of trading sex for drugs or cash to multiple customers professionally. I also do not agree that these drug-prostitutes should be considered distinctly from sex-for-cash prostitutes, because they do the exact same job in the exact same way for the same customers–their method of payment is just different.
Besides, you have to be fucking kidding me when you say this:
1) just because the contract was harsh doesn’t mean the women didn’t agree to it. They may have been offered a year of indentured service, for example. In the 90s in Australia this type of contract was common, with women having to work for nothing for a year to repay their smuggler. After this time they could work for real money, and a lot of women were willing to endure this first year for the lure of the second.
How shall I put this–so what? So the women agreed to be in indentured service. So what? Civilized societies do not allow indentured service (which is just another form of slavery) for anything, sex work or otherwise, so this is not an argument for allowing the indentured sex work to continue. Rather, it’s an argument for busting the place and helping the women get asylum and jobs in the country they’re in. We don’t allow indentured servants to come into our country and work in factories or in houses. Sex work is no different.
You don’t care about women: you just don’t want women making more money than you for things that you are not personally hot enough to do.
I think this sentence sums up just how vapid and intellectually dishonest this discussion has become. Amanda, I feel for you, having to moderate this bullshit.
“Furthermore, the conditions of being a housewife are very, very different from the conditions of trading sex for drugs or cash to multiple customers professionally.”
Get a life, Serafina. I can’t count the times I have heard a news story about women whose husbands or boyfriends traded their bodies for money or drugs to multiple customers. There was a young white woman arrested last year in NYC after her black “boyfriend” raped and murdered another young woman after picking her up from a club. It turned out that the young woman/accomplice/girlfriend was being sold by this scum as a prostitute (although she did not seem to perceive herself as such).
Furthermore, there are many housewives on drugs: these women have the same dependencies and same health problems as prostitutes, if not worse. At least prostitutes are (we hope) smart enough to always use condoms; meanwhile, many wives (and husbands) are too dense or too much in denial to realize that their spouse are cheating and bringing home STDs. Look at America: who has the most HIV infections? It’s not hookers; it’s teenage women and poor people of color. Poverty is the leading cause of health-related death, not prostitution.
Housewives on drugs lack the same judgment as sex workers on drugs and politicians on drugs and radio hosts on drugs. They allow their husbands to degrade them, to abuse their children, to take their money, to leave them with nothing, and so forth. At least most sex workers do get paid for what they contribute to a relationship!
Nice, Foucault. Anecdotes, made-up bullshit and not an actual fact in sight. You “can’t count” the number of stories about women being sold by their husbands–yet you also can’t come up with an actual specific example. And you fail to grasp that these women are prostitutes (they’re having sex for cash) and fall into the category I’m talking about. I’m especially amused by this:
At least prostitutes are (we hope) smart enough to always use condoms
…yeah. Because it’s all about how smart she is, and not what the client is in a position to demand from her. Even Spitzer demanded to go condomless with his prostitute, so apparently even high-class expensive call-girls don’t always use condoms.
Your pathetic intellectual dishonesty was fun for a while, but now I’m bored.
“Even Spitzer demanded to go condomless with his prostitute, so apparently even high-class expensive call-girls don’t always use condoms.”
Where do you borrow your facts? This is innuendo and speculation on the part of every two-bit newspaper in the world. We don’t actually know what Spitzer “demanded” (or asked) his escorts to do, do we?
We know from the transcript (which clearly you have not read) that the dispatcher or phone person asked the call-girl if he was “difficult,” because he has apparently asked to do some “basic things” in the past that were unsafe. But we don’t know if anyone was retarded enough to comply. For you to go from there, to assuming that escorts don’t use condoms is pretty stupid. But so is the rest of your argument, so go figure.
For those who don’t actually read transcripts of what sex workers say, but prefer to make up their own “facts”:
“On February 14, 2008, at approximately 12:02 a.m., Temeka Rachelle Lewis, a/k/a/ ‘Rachelle,’ the defendant, received a call from ‘Kristen.’ … Lewis asked ‘Kristen’ how she thought the appointment went, and ‘Kristen’ said that she thought it went very well. Lewis asked ‘Kristen’ how much she collected, and ‘Kristen’ said $4,300. ‘Kristen’ said that she liked him, and that she did not think he was difficult. ‘Kristen’ stated: ‘I don’t think he’s difficult. I mean it’s just kind of like … whatever … I’m here for a purpose. I know what my purpose is. I’m not a … moron, you know what I mean. So maybe that’s why girls maybe think they’re difficult. …’ ‘Kristen’ continued: ‘That’s what it is, because you’re here for a purpose. Let’s not get it twisted - I know what I do, you know.’ Lewis responded: ‘You look at it very uniquely, because … no one ever says it that way.’ Lewis continued that from what she had been told ‘he’ (believed to be a reference to Client-9, Spitzer) ‘would ask you to do things that, like, you might not think were safe - you know - I mean that … very basic things.’ … ‘Kristen’ responded: ‘I have a way of dealing with that. … I’d be like listen, dude, you really want the sex? … You know what I mean.’
Thanks Caitlin!
Serafina, I think you completely missed my point in dismissing the issue of sex-for-drugs. My point was: yes it is prostitution, and no we will never be able to discuss whether or not to decriminalise it, because it happens in informal arrangements in people’s backyards. This is distinct from the sort of sex work we can control, which is all we can really talk about when discussing decriminalisation. Unless you are interpreting the idea of drugs-for-sex as a full-time work model for these women, which it’s not - it’s an occasional exchange on the side. For more details about this and the notorious “sex-for-drugs” scandals of the 80s, there are some anthropologists who did work at the time you can read about . The only name I recall offhand is Maher L.
I think you also got the wrong end of the stick regarding my point about the contracts. I agree the contracts are evil, and people taking advantage of them need to be punished. However, I don’t deny the benefit some Asian sex workers get from these contracts, and I think they need to be weighed against the alternatives - which for many women consist of indentured service as sweatshop labourers or sex workers in their own countries at a fraction of the wage, in much worse conditions. In their zeal to crack down on trafficking, anti-trafficking campaigners are forgetting what the alternatives are for some of these women, and failing to put in place a better option for them. And so the trafficking continues.
But what you’re really missing here is simple: violence, degradation and drugs are not a serious factor in a decriminalised sex industry. Even in decriminalised sex work the encounters will, in general, be safer and more profitable than the alternatives for these women. Why do you think they are willing to do sex work rather than commit property crime?
“There was a young white woman arrested last year in NYC after her black “boyfriend” raped and murdered …”
Exactly why are you bring up the races of the couple in this case? Out of all the numerous instances of domestic violence you could have picked, you just happened to pick the one involving a black man and a white woman? Out of all the many, many BM/WW couples in NYC alone, most of which don’t involve abuse, you have to pick this one couple to be your poster child to prove - what?
“Exactly why are you bring up the races of the couple in this case? Out of all the numerous instances of domestic violence you could have picked, you just happened to pick the one involving a black man and a white woman?”
Well, why not? It seems to be the thing to do on this blog: noting peoples’ races when discussing their interactions. Recall the white family who attacked the black reporter…
Actually, it just seemed like a great example of a relationship where someone *thought* she was a girlfriend when actually most people would argue that she was a prostitute. I was responding to the absurd idea that *only* sex workers are sold for cash and drugs.
Here’s another case of a husband selling his wife (contrary to the notion that only pimps sell women). I’m sure you’ll be happy to know that both of these people are Indian:
Husband sells wife for Rs 5,000:
http://sify.com/news/fullstory.php?id=14623114
And here’s a nice bit of British weirdness involving a wife’s decision to sleep with other men outside of marriage (she was not a prostitute, but guess what, she’s still dead):
Sex pact’ husband killed wife:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/southern_counties/2944058.stm
What do you count as “a fact”? It seems to me that an anecdote is a fact if it’s true. Beyond the fact that pretty much everyone here has admitted that there is violence and abuse against prostitutes if it’s illegal and that decriminalisation isn’t a cure-all-ills miracle policy, what else do you want? Your other claims are that even prostitutes who don’t think they’re victims secretly are (if only they’d listen to you when you tell them they’re unhappy!) and that if, by some magic, they’re genuinely not, then that’s just because they’re a freak and we can’t listen to them anyway.
The thing I can’t get past is a tremendous presumption of bad faith that’s present here. There are people here who either have been hookers, are hookers, or live with hookers, and as far as I can tell pretty much all of that cohort says “you’re taking the worst aspects of the job, along with your own personal prejudices, and extrapolating it out to indict an entire group of people.”
Your criticism of Foucault (at least early on before he got angry and made the asinine “job you’re not pretty to do” comment, of which he should be fucking ashamed in the morning) is of a course with the rest of your attitude. His point was simple: if a woman has a choice of being a prostitute in China or of being a prostitute in the USA with better conditions, they are likely to choose the latter option. Similar to how people will choose hooking over starving. You don’t have to endorse that course of events in order to see that, if those are your only options, you’re more likely to pick the latter. It’s simply no good to target “trafficking” when women who are trafficked are making the best of a bad job. We all would rather that there were other options available to them, but if we take the bad options away without substituting them for better ones, all we’re doing is limiting them even further.
I agree that we should be busting the smugglers and helping the women get asylum. But then, I’m a radical leftist who’s pretty opposed to immigration controls in the first place and thinks people should be able to work where they like. Amazingly, what should happen isn’t what does happen, and one of the tedious and heartbreaking side effects of anti-trafficking laws as they stand is that women are shipped back to the places that they had worked so damn hard to get out of with nothing to show for it. Or they become illegal immigrants and, having no skills and no status, slip between the cracks and become streetwalkers and so don’t get helped in that situation either. As much as I despite the situations that make women feel this kind of life is a step up, and as much as I feel appalled by the scum who prey on them, I can’t help but be amazed by how little help the supposed “victims” in these situations actually get from the authorities, who treat these women with all the respect that illegal immigrants and hookers normally get from law enforcement.
You hear tales of women who’ve come back after being deported, who simply started again hooking in China or Thailand or Albania or Mexico to get the money to come back as soon as they landed. What fucking use is that? What good did we do? When I hear about this sort of thing happening I can’t help but throw my hands in the air and think “what the fuck are we doing?” Just like the war on drugs feeds drug dealers, so the war on immigrants and hookers feeds the traffickers. We rightly despise them but them do the thing that keeps them in business.
The overarching point is that there is no damn point “cracking down” on traffickers and people who abuse women by forcing them into indentured servitude as prostitutes if we’re not going to have a humane and cohesive social strategy to provide viable alternatives both for those we ‘rescue’ and for those who we would rather don’t make that decision in the first place. That should be our priority, not storming in with guns blazing and excoriating everyone in sight for being terrible and immoral. They might well be terrible and immoral, but if we can’t make a practical difference too then our moral high ground is at the top of a hill of beans.
Oh, and one more thing.
Spitzer offered money for her to go without condoms. Since the sums of money involved were staggeringly high, this cannot be considered a demand, and I think we need to stop pretending that this girl considered anything other than the money.
If she, in fact, did take the money then she sold out her own health and, at best, she can be accused of suffering from the perceived immortality of youth, and it’s perfectly reasonable to say that she’s not especially smart (also, neither is Spitzer for asking in the first place. Honestly, if she says yes to you she also says yes to her other clients, which means that you really don’t want to be going bareback with any hooker who will agree to go bareback. You are not a special and unique little snowflake.)
I reiterate: the dynamics of coercion at the bottom level of the prostitution pile do not apply at the top level. Conflating them because they’re both selling sex is like conflating your high street butcher with someone trading in pork futures on wall street because they’re both in the business of selling dead pigs.
How do we know what Spitzer demanded? He could have asked for a blow-job without a condom! He could have asked to screw her while smoking a cigarette (I saw someone speculating about this in a fake blog pretending to be “Kristen”). He could have asked her to kiss him, which is conceivably unsafe in the world of STDs.
We have no idea what went on in that room apart from the transcript. And according to the transcript, Spitzer did not make the young call-girl uncomfortable in any way. She “liked him,” and did not find him “difficult.” How hard is it to accept this fact? Why does everyone want to think he degraded her or asked her to screw without protection?? It was the phone person who said she had heard rumors from other girls that *someone* (perhaps Client 9) had asked for basic things that “might not be safe.”
I take back my earlier comment about thinking you are intelligent. You’ve amply demonstrated that I was trying to give you waaaayy too much credit.
It’s so much nicer around here when Foucault lurks instead of spreading her nonsense. It’s never long before she calls any feminist who disagrees with her “ugly” and usually at the point where even her feeble attempts at argument have been utterly destroyed by everyone else.
Ah, yes: the moment when the egg splits open and the grub crawls out. Are you going to finish the thought and call her a hairy-legged dyke while you’re at it?
Good to see the moral crusaders ignoring the testimony of one of the “victims” they want to help, and focussing instead on the mud-slinging.
One of the benefits of decriminalisation of sex work in Sydney has been the abilty of health workers and sex worker unions to get into brothels and encourage safe sex. Now the single biggest risk of HIV/STIs that Australian brothel workers face comes from their non-paying partners. What a surprise!
I was talking to Josh K, people. He’s a guy. Doesn’t anyone READ anymore?
I don’t know if Josh K a hairy-legged dyke, but that would certainly make him a lot more interesting than he is now!
I was just teasing him about not being hot enough for sex work; I’m sure he’d be a great hooker if he put his mind to it.
Has the sex work discussion run its course, do you think? I’m trying to think of a subtle way to link this all up to male circumcision, for old times sake, but I don’t think it’s happening.
In any case, I am too burnt out to fight with you wonderful cat girls. Have a good night.
Doesn’t matter, OWO isn’t really that much safer than unprotected vaginal intercourse. Doesn’t stop girls offering it, but gah!
“the dynamics of coercion at the bottom level of the prostitution pile do not apply at the top level.”
And you know this because you’ve spent many years directly invovled with this issue, right? Or is it something you want to believe because it suits you to believe it?
Sorry to shatter the dream, but price is absolutely no indicator of the absence of coercion.
“Doesn’t matter, OWO isn’t really that much safer than unprotected vaginal intercourse. Doesn’t stop girls offering it, but gah!”
My point was not to speculate on the comparative safety of unsafe practices. My point was simply that we don’t know what happened between Spitzer and his escort. We can imagine the coercion and degradation, or the consensual pleasures that they experienced. But at the end of the day, we have no idea.
People do unsafe things all the time when it comes to sex. Again, it does not take a call girl to be stupid. I would suspect that heterosexual men who do not pay for sex are probably far more careless about safe-sex than professional sex-workers or regular johns.
Whoa, there, flashheart, that wasn’t her testimony, that was her talking on the phone to the madam. Big difference. Plus, even if Kristen, or 1/3 of all prostitutes, or most high-price prostitutes are happy and healthy, we shouldn’t look away from the grim reality of the street trade.
And again, no one has challenged Ms. Farley’s study, just the book. (Except Caitlain, who is arguing that her study applies mostly to street prostitutes.) Even if the study only applies to U.S. street prostitutes, there are a lot of U.S. street prostitutes.
While I favor decriminalization (at least for the prostitutes), I will not pat myself on the back and pretend that it will get rid of the illegal sex trade.
PTSD is very serious. I’m not saying we should blame the people who have it, I’m saying we should use it to inform us that for many women, prostitution is a very harmful occupation.
And Foucalt, I cannot BELIEVE you brought up the 1 in 4 teenage girl statistic. How is that relevant? The more partners you have, the more STIs you are likely to have. The 1 in 4 number is just the ground state. Also, 18% of those girls have HPV (and while it can be pretty awful, i.e., cervical, throat, mouth and tongue cancer) it is also extremely ubiquitous, can be passed by non-sexual contact, can be passed despite condoms, (because of skin to skin contact w/ parts of the body not covered by the condom), and is a type of STD that something like 80% of women contract by the time they are 50. Also, if you have one STI (or have had an STI in the past) it does not mean you cannot catch another or recatch the one you had before. If you do not think that prostitutes, or other people who have high numbers of sexual partners, are more likely to have an STD (even if they use condoms EVERY TIME) you have an exceedingly poor understanding of epidemeology.
And I cannot believe that you would think that sex workers wouldn’t use condoms because they are not smart. Wow. Just wow. I would say condescend much, but that is pretty obvious already.
Whoa, there, flashheart, that wasn’t her testimony, that was her talking on the phone to the madam. Big difference. Plus, even if Kristen, or 1/3 of all prostitutes, or most high-price prostitutes are happy and healthy, we shouldn’t look away from the grim reality of the street trade.
And again, no one has challenged Ms. Farley’s study, just the book. (Except Caitlain, who is arguing that her study applies mostly to street prostitutes.) Even if the study only applies to U.S. street prostitutes, there are a lot of U.S. street prostitutes.
While I favor decriminalization (at least for the prostitutes), I will not pat myself on the back and pretend that it will get rid of the illegal sex trade.
PTSD is very serious. I’m not saying we should blame the people who have it, I’m saying we should use it to inform us that for many women, prostitution is a very harmful occupation.
And Foucalt, I cannot BELIEVE you brought up the 1 in 4 teenage girl statistic. How is that relevant? The more partners you have, the more STIs you are likely to have. The 1 in 4 number is just the ground state. Also, 18% of those girls have HPV (and while it can be pretty awful, i.e., cervical, throat, mouth and tongue cancer) it is also extremely ubiquitous, can be passed by non-sexual contact, can be passed despite condoms, (because of skin to skin contact w/ parts of the body not covered by the condom), and is a type of STD that something like 80% of women contract by the time they are 50. Also, if you have one STI (or have had an STI in the past) it does not mean you cannot catch another or recatch the one you had before. If you do not think that prostitutes, or other people who have high numbers of sexual partners, are more likely to have an STD (even if they use condoms EVERY TIME) you have an exceedingly poor understanding of epidemeology.
And I cannot believe that you would think that sex workers wouldn’t use condoms because they are not smart. Wow. Just wow. I would say condescend much, but that is pretty obvious already.
I was away for the weekend watching basketball, so I have been out of the discussions/debate. I am glad to see that people are actually pulling accounts from countries who have tried something different and reporting interpretations of the results. I hope to read many of the links. It is better than the simple logical (or illogical as the case may be) constructs erupting from our own prejudices which infect much of the discussion.
Unfortunately our moderator/leader Amanda remains stuck in her mental construct that most men, even at the higher price end of the market, are in it just to degrade women:
Amanda, it is too bad that the various people here who have contact with women at that end do not report the kind of asshat attitude you believe must exist have not had an impact on your thinking
Thank you for your rambling weirdness. I am not sure what your point actually is, but it was a trip.
I’m sure you’ll accuse me of being condescending or short-sighted here, but how can one favor decriminalization of prostitution for the prostitutes, yet not for the johns? It’s okay to sell sex, but your ass goes to jail if you buy it? Will your decriminalized prostitutes be selling sex to each other, or how will this work?
“While I favor decriminalization (at least for the prostitutes), I will not pat myself on the back and pretend that it will get rid of the illegal sex trade.”
I am not supporting the illegal sex trade. No one should be coerced into prostitution, or transported across borders for the purpose of prostitution. I am not in favor of brining illegal immigrants into America so that they can be sex workers; let these people take the normal route to a green card. It’s so much smarter than being deported for illegal entry *and* prostitution.
And yes, for your information, I *do* think that sex workers who do not use condoms are STUPID. Anyone who does not use condoms when having sex with a stranger (or with a friend or lover who has not been tested for HIV and other diseases) is STUPID. Does that clarify my broad-spectrum approach to the relationship between unprotected sex and stupidity?
I hope so.
To address your last point first, since you seem to prefer more organization in other people’s comments than you provide in your own, yes, it clarifies your broad-spectrum approach to oversimplifying people’s motivations and reducing them to “smart” or “stupid” without considering context.
I am not accusing you of supporting the illegal sex trade. I am stating MY position, which has nothing to do with you, and responding to other posters on this thread. I am pointing out that the illegal sex trade continues despite legalization, that street prostitution continues with brothels, and that street prostitution has real harms, which Caitlain agrees with, despite the fact that she and I have disagreed mightily on other points. Upthread. So if you find my references difficult to understand, you could do a search for “Ismone” and “Caitlain” and you would perhaps understand what I was saying to the posters who were paying attention when she and I and others were discussing the dangers of prostitution.
With regard to your statement about decriminalizing it only with regard to the prostitutes. Sweden has a policy of decriminalizing it for prostitutes, not johns. This, again, has been discussed upthread. If you do a “find” for “Sweden” you will find these posts. We do have similar laws already, e.g., re: battery. Consent is not a defense to battery. Nor is paying the person you batter. So if someone wants to pay money to hit another person, it is not a crime for the person being hit to consent and to take the money. It is a crime to hit that person.
I, of course, noticed that you didn’t respond to my argument re: the pointlessness of your bringing up the teenage girl 1 in 4 number. I wonder why.
To Foucault:
I apologize. The discussion of Sweden’s decriminalization for prostitues and not johns is not discussed for the first time upthread. It is discussed for the first time in the post. You know, the one we are both commenting on, and presumably, at one time, read.
Since the blog ate the comment that preceded the one now posted re: Sweden, here is a reconstruction.
To begin with your last point first, since you seem to require a great deal more organization from other posters than you provide, yes, that does clarify matters. It tells me that you employ a “broad-spectrum approach” toward making generalizations about people’s behavior without considering context, nuance, incentives, etc.
With regard to decriminalizing for prostitutes and not Johns, as discussed upthread, that is the model in Sweden. If you would like to know more you could do a “find” for the word “Sweden.” It is not inconsistent with some other laws we have on the books. For example, striking someone is a crime. If the person consents to be struck in exchange for money, it is still a crime. But consenting to be struck is not a crime, nor is taking the money.
As for my “rambling,” my last post did three things, since you seem to need a signpost. (Or at least to demand one from those lesser mortals who dare oppose thee.) First, it responded to flashheart’s comment. That is the part that is addressed to “flashheart.” Second, it responded to points flashheart and others had made about the validity of studies, and whether they only pertained to brothel prostitutes. I was expanding on a discussion I had upthread, with Caitlain and others, about the validity of certain studies. If you are terribly interested in that discussion, you can do a find for “Ismone” and “Caitlain.” Third, I responded to two things you said, first, the incidence of STDs in teenage girls, and your comment about condoms. I have already responded to your comment about condoms, and will take the opportunity to point out that you did not respond to the larger point of my post, which is that the 1 in 4 number is irrelevant.
Oh, and one final point of clarification. When I was discussing decriminalization and how legalization would not solve the problems of street prostitution, I was not addressing you. That is why your screen name did not appear before that part of my post. I was discussing MY views and pointing out that decriminalization does not get rid of illegal prostitution. There is more on that upthread as well.
Does that help? Or should I provide an index?
Since the blog ate the comment that preceded the one now posted re: Sweden, here is a reconstruction.
To begin with your last point first, since you seem to require a great deal more organization from other posters than you provide, yes, that does clarify matters. It tells me that you employ a “broad-spectrum approach” toward making generalizations about people’s behavior without considering context, nuance, incentives, etc.
With regard to decriminalizing for prostitutes and not Johns, as discussed upthread, that is the model in Sweden. If you would like to know more you could do a “find” for the word “Sweden.” It is not inconsistent with some other laws we have on the books. For example, striking someone is a crime. If the person consents to be struck in exchange for money, it is still a crime. But consenting to be struck is not a crime, nor is taking the money.
As for my “rambling,” my last post did three things, since you seem to need a signpost. (Or at least to demand one from those lesser mortals who dare oppose thee.) First, it responded to flashheart’s comment. That is the part that is addressed to “flashheart.” Second, it responded to points flashheart and others had made about the validity of studies, and whether they only pertained to brothel prostitutes. I was expanding on a discussion I had upthread, with Caitlain and others, about the validity of certain studies. If you are terribly interested in that discussion, you can do a find for “Ismone” and “Caitlain.” Third, I responded to two things you said, first, the incidence of STDs in teenage girls, and your comment about condoms. I have already responded to your comment about condoms, and will take the opportunity to point out that you did not respond to the larger point of my post, which is that the 1 in 4 number is irrelevant.
Oh, and one final point of clarification. When I was discussing decriminalization and how legalization would not solve the problems of street prostitution, I was not addressing you. That is why your screen name did not appear before that part of my post. I was discussing MY views and pointing out that decriminalization does not get rid of illegal prostitution. There is more on that upthread as well.
Does that help? Or should I provide an index?
Sorry, after many days of this, my ADD and AGGH! have gotten the best of me. Gotta move on.
Ismone, I was talking about Caitlin’s testimony not Kristen’s, which as we know is all just hearsay. Caitlin’s was given here and has been studiously ignored.
As I said before, Sweden’s “success” in reducing sex work needs to be seen in context. Sweden never had as big an industry as the Netherlands, and it is easy to divert to a neighbouring market in Northern Europe. Not to mention, of course, that to the best of my knowledge there is no intervention time series analysis of prostitution data in Sweden, so no actual evidence of any change due to these miraculous laws (I’d love to see some if there is).
Some of the claims of some of the anti-trafficking and anti-sex work organisations are ridiculous, by the way. ChildRight in the Netherlands claims there are 15000 underage girls in prostitution in teh Netherlands. That is 1 in 1000 of the population. That probably means that there are almost as many trafficked girls in the Netherlands as there are heroin users. Do you believe that?
As an aside, I started doing my sex-worker research career in HPV (genital warts) and the work i did showed that there was no difference in rates of HPV between sex workers and non sex-workers in Australia. The only risks were the number of non-paying sexual partners (as I mentioned above). Also, to the best of my knowledge Australia has only ever had one case of HIV that has been linked to sex work rather than injecting drug use. I count that a success.
HPV is so common, though. Do you know if persons with more partners, paying or non, have more strains? (This is out of curiousity, not just trying to pick.)
I have been listening to Caitlain, but considering the amount of control brothel prostitutes are under, I’m just not sure if they will be as open as they may wish to. The interviews she is getting may not be as candid as she thinks. She and I do agree that street prostitutes are in quite some danger.
1 in 1000? I don’t know, perhaps it could be that high. By the time American women reach college, 1 in 10 have been victims of completed rape, and the same number have been victims of attempted rape. Something like 1 in 8 female children and 1 in 6 male children have been molested. So I just don’t know enough about the child sex trade to know what sort of number seems like a reasonable estimate, and I don’t know enough about these Netherlands groups you speak of to be wary of them.
That is not to say that I would join ranks with the anti-sex work types. I completely disagree with their views on sexuality, human dignity, etc. But I am certainly anti-trafficking.
Ismone, in the studies we worked on the rates were generally 25-30%, but most of the types of HPV were low-risk for cervical cancer. Unfortunately it’s hard to say if sex workers had different types of high-risk HPV because of their sex work status, because different countries have different prevalences, and we were attempting to study Asian sex workers. so they necessarily had different types of HPV to white Australian sex workers. The types were broadly consistent with the ethnic backgrounds of the women. The single biggest predictor of HPV risk is the number of non-paying sexual partners, because in general women in this day and age don’t use condoms wtih regular partners and, as you say, HPV is so common.
Those statistics about rape, sexual assault, child abuse etc. I also don’t believe. Mostly because they aren’t random and often they are simple retrospective cross-sectional studies, conducted in highly dubious settings, with extremely high rates of refusal. You shouldn’t use one set of shonky studies to triangulate on another set of shonky studies.
As another example, anti-sex work activists like to claim that decriminalisation increases the amount of street-based sex work, pointing to the (obvious) consequence of decriminalisation - that previously illegal brothels now become, by definition, legal - and suggesting that street-based sex work must experience a similar “increase”. But when you look at time series of actual street prostitution offences in states with decriminalisation, they show no change at all over the last 10 years. The Australian New South Wales series, for example, shows a huge increase in 2001 when heroin disappeared from the streets, but there is zero increase in 1996, when the decriminalisation laws were passed. A slight increase in 1998 also corresponds to a saturated cocaine market. This is telling you that prostitution activity is controlled by other factors than decriminalisation, but decriminalisation gives an excellent opportunity to control those brothels - which is why we can trust Caitlin’s interviews, which were almost certainly conducted out of earshot of the managers.
My particular and only gripe with the “outrage” feminism of the anti-trafficking and anti-porn movements - which are quick to ally with christian fundamentalists - is that they show very little reliance on good research results, and put a lot of time into misreading small studies by clearly biassed researchers like Farley. Farley even explicitly attacks the use of language which sex workers prefer, arguing that old, conservative terms like prostitute are more suitable. She also would like to see laws which punish traffickers as traffickers (rather than merely people smugglers) even when the “victim” gave consent and approved of the trafficking, so she also ignores the please of third world sex workers to enrich themselves in first world markets. I prefer to get my facts cold from pubilc health researchers, or to heed advocacy pleas from the women who do the work, than to listen to armchair moralists and their distortions.
That’s real sweet of you…
(isn’t that contradictory? because….)
Ah, yes. And there’s the catch: I don’t get to treat you according to my moods or how you treat me. I have to be polite no matter what your mood happens to be, or how I get treated. But that’s completely beside the point ‘cuz it’s not like that entails any work on my part or anything. And it certainly isn’t an added convenience for you.
No, the fact that I don’t get to treat everyone that comes into the store just like you treat “anyone else [you] meet” is not at all what I was talking about. No, it’s all about whether you in particular are not so evil that you still bother to be (moderately) polite when you come in.
So, of course, my heartfelt apologies for not realizing that you are the one person in the world who won’t complain to manager if I do slip and treat you according to how you treat me or even (gasp!) according to how my mood is.
You wear a sign, right? So that we all know that it’s you when you come in? Stamped on your forehead maybe?
It’s also real fascinating to know that you pick favorite bookstores based only on the distance you have to travel and and the number and type of books they have in them. Or are there some other factors that I’m not thinking of that cause you to pick Borders over B&N over the locally owned shop?
That’s three different questions. Or, rather, far too many to count, since believing that certain illegal drugs should be legal =/= thinking all illegal drugs should be legal. (or even that all legal drugs should be legal) Since my biggest issue is that so many people here arguing against Amanda seem to be arguing for sweeping decriminalization without much naunce, your lumping all that in together doesn’t really strengthen your argument.
And going back to prostitution….as others have frequently pointed out, registering as a prostitute - which is required for any regulation proposed here - carries with it a stigma. A disproportionate one compared to having been in rehab, especially considering that one is an addiction while the other is supposedly simply a job. So, apples and oranges.
And I’m pointing out that that doesn’t work in almost any instance of the selling of services. Being a service provider puts one in a subservient position to the people you are providing a service to. This does not need to be an overly exploitive or dangerous position, but society’s views on class, sex and gender often make it one quite often, especially when it comes to selling sex - in any form. It’s obvious the current system isn’t working, but I’m hardly convinced that decriminalization across the board is the best solution.
Mickle, I was trying to be polite but your response is unnecessarily mean-spirited, and picky to boot. I don’t know where you’re going with this shopping analogy, but it doesn’t make sense. I go to bookshops, I buy books, if I’m in a good mood I’m nice and if I’m not in a good mood I’m not so nice - as is the person behind the counter. I don’t pay a yen of my money to be mean to anyone, and if I thought the service I was receiving contained such a premium I would consider it yen wasted. I don’t have to wear a sign because to the best of the knowledge most people work on this principle. If you doubt that, go work in a place where the people are getting their service for nothing - like a job centre or a hospital - and you’ll see the same behaviour.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to argue here anyway - that people go to bookshops instead of online because they want to pay to humiliate the staff? If that is your point, doesn’t that kind of belie your argument that prostitution is special? And what did they do before the internet? I think the analogy has been pushed too far.
My question was actually one question as well Mickle - do you support Harm Reduction (and it wasn’t particularly aimed at you). Decriminalisation of prostitution is seen as a harm reduction step, i.e. a practical way to reduce harm. And harm reduction is founded on the idea that you don’t outlaw victimless crimes because of your moral concerns, if doing so creates a victim in the process. You need to argue it’s not victimless, and the anti-sex work claims of this are weak.
If you look at the links I’ve provided, you’ll see I am not advocating sweeping decriminalisation without nuance - I’m advocating a particular nuanced model, put successfully into practice in at least one country. That particular model, by the way, doesn’t require anyone to register as a sex worker. But I notice a tendency to shy away from confronting the details of any particular model on the part of opponents of decriminalisation. I wonder if this is because it doesn’t fit well with the outrage.
Flashheart,
I am beginning to see this a bit more clearly, I think. While I am still not ready to throw out the Farley studies, this interview on Feministe makes me think that one-sided decriminalization is a no-go.
Here it is, in case you are interested:
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2008/03/17/decriminalization-ending-demand-and-choice/
Ismone, that was an interesting article and made the points about harm reduction which I have been trying to make here very well. There are a lot of facts to support the contention that decriminalisation doesn’t increase sex work as well, you know - you can find them pretty easily on google scholar.
As for Melissa Farley - she wrote that god awful “Why I became a sex worker” piece, I think, which includes a really nasty point about “when I’m too old and ugly to do sex work, I’ll make money writing books about how empowering it is”. She mocks the women she purports to protect, and I think that it’s unlikely she is an “objective” researcher.
I’ve been for decriminalization, I have never thought that prostitues should be punished.
But I am worried about “normalizing” the act of buying sex, because although I am sure there are good johns, I also read things that a lot of potential clients write on the internet, and they seem to actively HATE women.
It is interesting, because I had this same discussion (as Anonymouse) on the law blog “Above the Law” and most of those in favor of legalization were constantly saying offensive things about sex workers. Only those who were against legalization and regulation (but who also supported decriminalization) ever said anything kind about the sex workers. The arguments all rested on theoretical discussions of agency, without considering lived reality. They also did not seem to care about the well-being of sex-workers—the regulations they proposed were beneficial to the johns. I am not lumping you with those people by any stretch of the imagination, but that discussion did make me realize that regardless of what policy changes we make (or lobby for) there needs to be a lot more education. It also made me realize how downright poisonous some of the men in my profession are. (And a few of the women. Although they were usually more callous.)
But of course, I have no problem with stripping/phone-sex/domination without “sex” being legal. So I am just a collection of contradictions, here.
Ismone, the benefits of decriminalisation to johns are minimal - it removes the risk of a very low-risk activity, and for thsoe who use street-based workers any decriminalisation scheme acceptable to Americans would not change their risk at all. But the benefits to sex workers are huge. One of the first and most obvious being that the large portion of the population (including many people posting here) who mock sex workers, and refer to them as prostitutes, call girls, hookers etc. will have to come to terms with the fact that these women are real people protected by law. That has a big impact on peoples’ attitudes to a group.
A big part of the problem here is that the USA still hasn’t properly come to grips with the twin ideas of public health and harm reduction like the rest of the world. So adult left-wing people in the US are still struggling with the idea that decriminalising something they (personally) think is immoral will actually have a bigger benefit for society (and for them) than the status quo. This idea is pretty broadly accepted in England and Australia, which is why our HIV rates are so low and those in the USA are so shockingly high - particularly amongst injecting drug users, who are very likely to also be sex workers, and least able to insist on condom use in an illegal work environment.
US Population: 301,139,947 (July 2007 est.)
UK Population: 60,776,238 (July 2007 est.)
Australia Population: 20,434,176 (July 2007 est.)
While I agree with most of what flashheart argues, particularly that sex work should be decriminalized to protect the workers, I am not exactly sure that the decriminalization of sex work has a great deal to do with the comparative rates of HIV infection in the UK, Australia, and the United States.
I think that part of our “shockingly high” rate of infection is simply a result of our population. The more people there are, the more chances that some (or many) of them will be infected with HIV (and other diseases).
For the record, although I use the terms “call girl,” “prostitute,” and “hooker,” I don’t intend these terms as insults to sex workers. I use them interchangeably with “sex worker.” I know my reason sucks–I like colorful language–but it gets boring to say “sex worker” all the time. I say “hooker” just as respectfully as “sex worker.” But I do see your point that these terms may carry a very different cache for those who value certain kinds of “work,” but not others.
For those unsure of the comparative rates of HIV in the USA and Australia, Consider figure 9 of this publication for example, compared to Australia (you can view the reports on Australian prevalence here). It is 40% in the North East of the US, compared to 0-5% in Australia. I should point out that Australia has had an extremely serious heroin epidemic for 10 years (until 2001), during which it was the second biggest killer of young people after injury. Despite that, and the fact that Australia is the most urbanised country in the developed world, IDUs have very low rates of HIV in Australia.
The reason it’s relevant to decriminalisation of sex work is that they are all part of the same harm reduction philosophy. I don’t get the impression that many people in the US have yet come to grips with harm reduction, and until they do they face the risk of HIV escaping the injecting drug user population through sex workers. As well, of course, as spreading chlamydia, which is easily treatable but has devastating consequences (infertility) if left untreated by women who do not realise that their partners are shagging sex workers unsafely when they go on their business trips. If commenters here aren’t swayed by concern for the fate of women (sex workers) incapable of protecting themselves against STIs and HIV in a dangerous environment, perhaps they can be swayed by the thought of the innocent partners of those evil johns who use the power an illegal market gives them to extort dangerous services.
Point taken about the language, Foucault.
Thanks flashheart,
Your patience and pedagogical style here have been a welcome change of pace from the bickering and name-calling that tends to occur when people disagree.
I will read the links you’ve posted about comparative HIV rates. And to be clear, I’m sure that there *is* a direct correlation between the decriminalization of sex work, and improved health conditions for all those directly or peripherally involved.
Flashheart,
Do you think that some of the difference between HIV rates in the US and Australia could have to do with patient 0 having a number of American sex partners? (Not blaming it all on him, just wondering if the epidemic is larger here because it started sooner.)
Also, I do not get a sense that the posters here who are opposed to legalization take issue with sex workers (I use the word prostitute as well because some call themselves sex workers while others call themselves prostitutes). I see a lot more john-hate on this thread than anything else, and also concern that it will increase the numbers of people in prostitution and/or not decrease the risks of illegal prostitution. So as I put it upthread, allow people to pat themselves on the back for doing the “right” thing, without helping the very worst off, who I presume to be street sex workers.
Thanks Foucault, but I usually think of “pedagogical” as an insult… it sounds so stuffy and out of keeping with my screen name … woof!
Ismone, patient 0 may have had American sex partners, but HIV started in the gay community in Australia very soon after America and spread rapidly. Both countries introduced the free condom (i.e. harm reduction for gay communities) model early in the development of HIV in that community (back when being gay was much more stigmatised than it is now), and the prevalence of HIV has followed similar paths in both countries’ gay scenes. It is in injecting drug user populations - where HIV arrived later and spread faster - that the epidemic has been different, and the main difference is the needle/syringe model.
If it can work in gay communities and IDUs with HIV, you can be pretty confident that it will work amongst sex workers with chlamydia. I think (long time since i checked) that sex workers are seen as a sentinel population for chlamydia in Australia and their incidence and prevalence rates are broadly similar to those of non sex-workers. This is a triumph of, first, sex worker unions and their outreach programs and, later, of law reform in key markets. The harm reduction model works very well, but I don’t think it is very well received in the US generally, and some of the comments here (and in this debate generally) reflect that. It’s as if you guys are still trying to invent a very well worn wheel, and thrashing over arguments which were pretty much settled in the UK and Australia 20 years ago.
As regards street workers and the way in which decriminalisation may help them - in Sydney, Australia, some areas are designated kerb crawling areas, where it is not illegal to solicit sex work or loiter with intention. This makes it easy for police to protect sex workers from assault (which, believe it or not, they often do now), makes the sex workers easy to reach with health outreach programs, and keeps them working close to health centres, needle/syringe exchanges, womens shelters and homeless shelters. There are also some semi-formal places for women to use as rooms for sex. The sex worker outreach project also runs an “ugly mug” scheme for street-based workers, where dangerous clients are reported and information is handed out (with descriptions and behavioural descriptions) to these women. The police tend to cooperate with this and with the health, treatment and outreach programs (quite explicitly at times). Almost all the women working on the streets in Sydney are drug users, i.e. very vulnerable, and often from very poor and violent backgrounds. This model is absolutely the best I have seen for keeping these women alive and (mostly) disease free until they can kick their drug habit. And it has one huge advantage - seriously addicted women who cannot do sex work will do property or violent crime, and they will get caught. Keeping them out of prison keeps them away from Hepatitis C and also helps them keep their children, if they have any.
So even the poorest and worst off sex workers can be helped by decriminalisation, and losing all the things I just described is the price of keeping it illegal so you can fight a highly strategic moral war against sexual exploitation - which will still happen to these women no matter what, because they are addicted to heroin.
Question, and if I am being too lazy re: research, you can tell me to piss off, but what happens to brothel sex workers who have STDs? Are they forced to “retire” for a while? (Or permanently?)
I am actually shocked that drug use is so high among street prostitutes in Australia, my understanding is that in the U.S., something like 5% of sex workers start to support a drug habit, and a larger number (maybe 10-15%) become hooked either by pimps or just because. Are drug users excluded from brothels?
In Australia, most brothels require their workers to get a “certificate” every 3 months or so, vouching for their good health, and there are special free, anonymous clinics where they can get them. They cannot work if the certificate says they have an STD, but health care in Australia is free for everyone, so they get treatment, get another certificate, and return to work. Usually they work as contractors, and it’s one of the downsides of contracting.
Of course for street-workers there is no such system - another reason why decriminalisation is good for public health.
As for the proportion of street workers who are drugusers - I would suggest your statisticis are wrong, unless sex work is very different in the US. Most sex workers work in brothels for good money. And yes, usually heavy drug users are excluded from brothels. I think the figures you’re talking about - sex workers becoming “hooked”? How does that work? - are in the realm of myth.
Yes, anony, this is exactly right. I know you thought you were being sarcastic. Amazing how that works, isn’t it?
I’m arguing that people go to bookshops instead of online bc of the convenience. But they don’t really stop to think about the fact that “convenience” is often predicated on the ability to treat staff as if they aren’t worthy of basic civility. At least at the B&N/Borders type places anyway.
I’m hardly trying to argue that prostitution is “special,” I’m pointing out that Amanda’s belief that most johns visit prostitutes bc they get to treat them like trash fits into my experiences as a service worker.
I’m not outraged at the idea of prostitution, I’m outraged at the sexism that pervades society and I’m beyond annoyed at those who argue that johns only go to prostitutes for the “convenience” - and therefore can’t possibly be as mean as those feminist say they are - without really considering what “convenience” entails in our sexist society.
bc while prostitution may not be “special” it certainly isn’t just like working at a bookstore, either. Not just because the illegal nature of selling sex puts workers at an extreme disadvantage (which needs to be fixed asap), but bc of the way society views women and sex.
And seriously, mean? For pointing out that you are trying to have it both ways by claiming to always being civil to staff, but then completely ignoring the fact that staff don’t have the luxury of defining “civil” as you do? (Not to mention the issue that however nice you are doesn’t change the fact that not everyone is.)