Fight for the real victims of prostitution: Pimps and Johns, idiot demands

My view is that, speaking abstractly, there’s nothing essentially wrong about paying someone for consensual sex. I’ve personally never had a girlfriend and I’ve always felt that masturbation was enough if I needed to fulfill some sexual desire. I don’t feel like I’m being unfairly denied sex by women.

As a practical matter, though, the vast majority of prostitution is non-consensual and connected with trafficking. The Nordic model is probably necessary if you actually want to decrease demand and make it more difficult for pimps to make a profit. Of course, there are always cases in which people try to twist the law to punish or discriminate against sex workers, but there is discrimination in the Netherlands and Germany.

Amnesty International is usually pretty good, but I think they’re wrong on this. I guess they could be right and countries just need to prosecute trafficking and abuse adequately.

@Catalpa, well said. I don’t think this discussion should be about those that aren’t abused/abusive. Amnesty doesn’t need policy for them. The existence of those who feel they’ve made a choice shouldn’t erase the experiences of those who haven’t. I think everyone knows there exist people in the sex industry who feel this way. But often the conversation seems to become dominated by that, which seems unfair.

In England the authorities seemed to draw a distinction between on-street and off-street work.

Generally the on-street policing was based on the ‘public nuisance’ element. There were certain tacit red-light areas where sex work was almost part of the ambience. There may have been the occasional sweep or clamp down in kerb crawling, but if the working girls played by certain unwritten rules they were ‘tolerated’. Every now and then though some ‘concerned citizens’ or local politician would make a fuss. There’d be a clamp down. Then the girls would have to transfer to more out of sight locations. That of course left them isolated and even more open to abuse.

The police turned a blind eye to off-street work so long as certain rules were followed (no alcohol or drugs, no under age girls). This arrangement was so ingrained that, when the police raided some brothels, the courts kicked out the cases on the grounds that previous undertakings given by the police and the women’s compliance meant the raids amounted to an abuse of process.

Now however there’s the big problem with trafficked women. That takes place generally off street (although as the women’s language skills improve they are being sent out on their own). The police have abandoned their ‘what takes place behind closed doors stays there’ approach and started kicking a few doors down. One problem with that though is that whilst the CPS will regard the women as victims in terms of prosecution, they are vulnerable in terms of immigration status. That gives the people who have control over them a lot of leverage (“If you report the abuse you’ll be deported anyway”)

So for trafficked workers, it’s not just a matter of legality that is a concern but the fact that being returned to whatever hellhole they escaped from always hangs over them.

Scented Fucking Hard Chairs | August 18, 2015 at 3:37 pm
I think we all agree that laws regarding prostitution should be focussed on those who are/were trafficked or otherwise forced into it… But I’m not sure what being kinda condescending, moralise-y and rude to those who are/were sex workers by choice is supposed to help. We can concentrate on the former group without completely shutting out the latter group.

I second this. There’s a lot of condescension in the thread right now, and I can understand your hearts are in the right place in that you want to protect people, but that’s no reason to dismiss people who are/were part of that system.

So an actual former sex worker comes in and tells her story and she is immediately dismissed by people who have never done sex work themselves. White feminism at it’s finest.

Y’all should take a deep look in the mirror and rethink why you think your own opinion on this is worth more than the opinion of the people this actually concerns.

Here is some reading to do. All pages of it. http://misandry-mermaid.tumblr.com/tagged/sex+work

Stop being wh*rephobic and instead listen to them as people rather than objects

So an actual former sex worker comes in and tells her story and she is immediately dismissed by people who have never done sex work themselves. White feminism at it’s finest.

Yuuuuup.

Good point Alan, having some kind of refugee program or policy for people who are victims of sex trafficking would probably go a long way to helping those folks report and escape the situation they’ve been forced into.

SFHC, I agree that moralizing at current/former sex workers is also unproductive, but telling people to stop being condescending about sex work on this thread is kind of… Nebulous? What kind of statements, specifically, are being taken exception to, aside from the use of the word ‘prostitute’? I suppose talk about how sec work is soul destroying is also condescending, but I’m pretty sure most people on this thread mean coerced or forced sex work being soul destroying. On a thread about protecting the human rights of trafficked/impoverished people, does that need to be specified? I’m genuinely asking.

hobbsianacademic: I agree that you shouldn’t be ‘lumped in with’ the teeming mass of johns who do not treat prostitutes respectfully. However, and I will acknowledge this bluntly, it may be necessary to throw you under the bus–yes, the Nordic model would leave you, as a client, at risk for arrest, and that may be unfair, given that if the clients all behaved as you describe, there would be no problems. However, the suffering and degradation that seems to accompany both full legalization AND full prohibition is so terrible, and so great, that the unfairness you would face by comparison is simply not enough to try to whittle out an exemption of some sort.

In many ways, the West is still in our early adolescence, collectively. We’re simply not mature enough, as a culture, to actually incorporate full legalization without cases of horrific abuse.

Sure, not all sex workers are exploited, and not all Johns are abusive. I fail to see what this has to do with the discussion at hand, regarding the legality of sex work and the protection of human rights, though. Are you suggesting that since you have an anecdote about safe and healthy sex work, that we shouldn’t be focusing on legislation and policies to protect people who have been trafficked or coerced into sexual slavery?

Nobody is suggesting that, but the reality is that prostitution (I’m using this term because ‘sex workers’ also includes pornographic performances) is still illegal in most of the United States and in many other places around the world, and the fact that it’s illegal contributes to a culture in which abuses are harder to report to police. Someone asked David not to use the term prostitute, which prompted others to respond with absolutist messages such as ‘no woman has ever actually chosen to be a sex worker’, which some of us think is hugely condescending and presumptuous. It’s a bit off topic to David’s actual post about an idiotic MRA, but that’s the way the conversation went.

I don’t that’s your stance, and maybe you’re just trying to share your viewpoint on sex work. Fair enough, it’s good to hear all kinds of viewpoints. But saying “not all! Not all!” without any suggestion on policy that would help those NOT in your situation, doesn’t seem productive.

People have been making suggestions, such as adopting the Nordic model, and I pointed out that Germany’s problems seem to be a at least in part a matter of weak punishments, including no prison time for human trafficking (something I find completely unconscionable, human trafficking is one of the worst crimes imaginable to me).

I don’t think anyone is saying #notalljohns to derail discussion of the actual problems. It’s just a reaction to where the conversation had already gone.

RE: white feminism

Considering how intersectionalism and racism work, it seems a lot more likely that white people would be the ones able to be involved in relatively safe, nonexploitative sex work than people of marginalized races would.

I do have a feeling I should step back from this thread, though. It’s starting to feel a little doom-y.

Since our culture has distorted, contorted, and otherwise fucked up sexuality, including trying to sell outrageously misguided ideas concerning sexual morality, it is difficult to have a rational discussion about matters involving sexuality without straying into unwarranted moralism and judgmentalism. Because of the social baggage that has become attached to prostitution over millenia, it is an even more difficult subject to deal with. But I think there are a few starting points that most of us will agree on.
(1) We should not be judgmental about people who have engaged in prostitution (as the actual providers, not pimps or johns), and should not shame them or impugn their character in any way.
(2) Society should not be involved in sexual activity between consenting adults whether or not money is exchanged. As usual, the devil is in the details, and in this case the critical detail is consent — can such an arrangement be truly consensual if the person receiving the pay needs it to live? (This is more complicated question than it might seem at first glance.)
(3) No matter how much we may oppose prostitution per se, we need to recognize that if all we do is to in effect take away from prostituted women their means of making a living without providing them a viable alternative, then we are not doing them a favor.
This is a very complicated issue and it isn’t going to be brought to an acceptable resolution any time soon, but there is plenty of egregious crime (trafficking, etc.) to be tackled and cleaned up before we will need to get into the finer points of consent and agency.

Fnoicby | August 18, 2015 at 3:59 pm
@nightmarelyre, how do you know nobody else here has done sex work? Do we have to disclose that to have an opinion?

No, but that “opinion” would be backed up by actual experience in sex work, so it would have more weight than mine, as someone who’s never done it.

It’s all well and good that we’re willing to discuss it, but I’m not willing to discuss it if we’re going to allow everyone to put their two cents in with no deference to people who have done/are doing sex work.

A few people are being very dismissive of people who have come in to give their experiences with the system, and that’s not cool.

I’m sorry but this isn’t “white feminism”, I respectfully suggest you have some reading to do if you think it is.

And I would like to “respectfully suggest” that you’re wrong. This is very much white feminism, as it’s excluding a hell of a lot of people who aren’t white, cishet, middle-class able-bodied women, and it feels like y’all are throwing women who are actually coming in to talk about their experiences under the bus for some sort of holier-than-thou savior complex.

I’m with nightmarelyre on this one. The smell of SWERF in this thread is too much.