Blow is totally feminist though
269 Comments Published by R. Mildred August 10th, 2006 in Feminism, Lick My Jackboots of Love, Sex, What Patriarchy?All oppressive systems utilise mutually exclusive dichotomies.
The plutocracy for instance will often lambaste the poor for not being able to work or think their way out of the badly paid job they work long hours at, the working class’ is that they’re just not showing enough initiative, why when I was their age I was already on my way to earning my first million!* And if the working classes take a look at the system and say “fuck this” and start resorting to crime because that earns more money for less actual work (though with increased risks of course) they’re evil and lazy, why I never had to break the law to make my money.**
Of course every rich person has killed someone, whether directly or as a result of their mad scrabble to be even richer than the Jones’s in the Mansion Ranch next door (across the mile or so of estate that separates the Right people from each other), but that is as of nothing versus those poor folk who ignore concepts like property rights in their mad scramble to survive in system that actively wants to kill them.
Same goes the for the Aryanocracy or Heteronormitivity, Mexicans are, on the one hand, lazy feckless criminals, and on the other hand, evil scheming bastards who are going to take over the world by picking lettuce illegally for 10 cents an hour, and homosexuals are, if they’re not all “I’m queer, I’m here, get used to it”, then they’re obviously ashamed of their lifestyle choice, and obviously agree that it’s just plain wrong, and if they actually are all into pride and outness, then they’re shoving their immoral lifestyle into everyone’s face, and perverting the children† in the process.
Oppressive systems are of course like this naturally, they’re basically ginormous collections of various interlocking and symbiotic memes, and thus subject to selective pressures, those systems of oppression that didn’t set up a series of contradictory concepts which enabled people who didn’t fit into any one predefined stereotypical manner of behavior to be screwed over just as much as those that did, was destroyed or surpassed by better systems of oppression, who could oppress so much better and thus continue to give the oppressor classes their wonderful privileges without fear of the oppressed classes breaking the system from within due to something crazy like consistency and fairness.
Now you may have noticed that certain themes tend to run through the various systems of oppression I mentioned, the plutocracy always states that, no matter what the working class do, they’re still inherently lazy because they’re not rich and no matter what homosexuals do, their sexuality is still inherently icky.
A similar theme runs through the patriarchy in regards to sex, sure, on the one hand women are supposed to be asexual and do not want to have sex under any circumstance, but on the other hand men have a Y-chromosome given right to have sex whenever and however they please.
How does The Patriarchy square that circle? Oh, just a little thing called the Rape Culture.
Now I’ve written before about how the only patriarchally approved form of sex is rape, this is because rape is an act which, by definition, involves a person not wanting to have sex but some guy having sex with them anyway, to the rape culture and patriarchy this is perfect, you have a man having sex but they’re not having sex with an actually sexual person, and in such a traumatic and violent manner that the person who has had sex thrust upon them may even end up giving up consensual sex all together.
This is why the most visible rape culture concept you’ll likely see is the whole rape victim blaming thing, which works by a bunch of guys and patriarchal tools coming along and talking about the many ways in which, obviously, the victim did something wrong, like how they gave their prima facie consent to be raped by doing something crazy like leaving the house, or going to college, or joining the military or drinking alcoholic beverages.
Now such talk is of course insane, you can’t be raped and have been at fault, you can’t go out and get raped, that would imply that it was in some way a consensual act, and rape cannot be a consensual act, ergo you cannot go out and “get” raped, the very idea is nonsensical.
But the point is to conflate consensual sex with rape, so that activities or behavior that occur primarily because a woman is not hiding her sexual nature and may even want to do something as crazy as want to have consensual sex with someone, such as dressing “like a slut” (or just being a stripper, prostitute, porn star etc… a member of the rape class basically) or drinking (a major part of most human mating rituals in the first world), inherently also imply that a woman wants to be raped too, because obviously there is no distinction between consensual sex between two (or more) people who really want to have sex with each other, and a man masturbating using a woman’s body.
Now the distinction between consensual sex and rape is simply that, with consensual sex we have two (or more) people who really want to have sex with each other, while with rape you have one guy who feels it necessary to prove his manliness by fucking someone who either A) actively doesn’t want to have sex or B) doesn’t struggle too hard.
Now note that I mentioned people who want to have sex with each other, as Bitch|Lab pointed out, mutuality is key here (the only really important thing when it comes to sex positive feminist views towards any sort of sex), everyone has to actively want to have sex with everyone else involved or it’s not sex by the sex positive feminist conception of sex, the idea that if a person doesn’t object too loudly then it’s not rape is rejected by sex positive feminism as an entirely patriarchal line of rape enabling bullshit.
Which brings me around to the never ending argument that’s been going on at Pandagon between prostitutes waving the banner of “choice” and “sex positive feminism”, a gay man who needs his blow jobs on demand and the “radfems” who the other two groups think hate prostitution because prostitutes have sex for money, whereas they actually hate prostitution because prostitutes have sex for money.
OMGWTFBBQ, I hear you cry (nice pronunciation btw), people not getting the subtle nuance of an argument? Surely not!? You ask, confused and scared at this strange new world you’ve glimpsed in which nuance appears to be too much for some people to handle.
Next you’ll tell us that people have been whipping out Dworkin as an insult for reasons other than allying with right wingers during the 80s against porn and prostitution, you joke.
Heh.
Which is really the only reason anyone should point to Dworkin and radfems as a bad thing, their thinking and writing, and more importantly their legal work making date rape a crime and all that, are pretty sound and they can shit internal consistency, what with them having such stuff up the wazoo and then some.
That they allied with the right-wingers and have since been demonised by the patriarchy and feminists alike should really stand as a testament to how making deals with the right wing are going to end up with you getting screwed over.
Of course, it’s technically a fight over the legalization of prostitution, but if it was then there’d be questions asked like “does legalization actually help the most vulnerable and abused prostitutes?” and stuff, not “I deserve the right to sell my body for cash and enable the patriarchy because I am able to get other work, and this is feminist and empowering because I say so”, which is nice, because women should feel empowered enough to be so moulitsas± in public, however that doesn’t in anyway make the moulitsas argument any less… moulitsas.
Because prostitution is wrong, and here’s why…
Now KH, the main legalisation pusher in that thread, is convinced that prostitution is not coercive, and htat prostitution is just another form of sexual choice – like blowjobs and engaging in consensual sex. Now her main reason for this is based on a long winded bit of academic masturbation, which starts off with this little gem:
Nonetheless, the following discussion will focus on a narrower sense of the term more in line with its use by major historical philosophical writers and contemporary theorists alike. This usage will rule out, by stipulation, such things as mere disapproval, emotional manipulation, or wheedling.
So basically she holds her position by playing semantics with some wording using the wanky academic concept of “coercion”. Uhuh, that’s philisophically sound, that everyone else uses the term in the normal way to mean methods of manipulation that include emotional manipulation, as well as socio-economic manipulation, is beside the point, she has redefined “is” to justify her profession and that’s the end of that (I am of course using a magical term that her academics had to actively point out they weren’t using, which I made up entirely, of course).
We know that prostitution is coercive in the normal, as opposed to the “Could I make it any more clear that I’m really reaching for justifcations here?”, sense of the word coercion from the most basic economic concept of supply and demand.
Now everyone knows supply and demand, hell it’s all most libertarians and right wingers know about economics, but due to supply and demand, a suppler with a monopoly in something can jack their prices sky high because they don’t have to worry about competition undercutting them, they’re the only supplier in town and so if anyone wants to buy their produce, they need to pay those prices and thus have no real bargaining power, unless demand is almost non-existent.
If the dynamic then becomes a matter of needs versus wants, the power imbalance becomes even more pronounced, because the person who needs something is in a position where, unless there’s a serious bounty of supply for that needed stuff, they have no choice but to pay what ever they have to obtain it, and if the supplier merely wants their money, because for instance they’re rich already and are now just amassing a huge money filled swimming pool for their own personal amusement, then they can turn the person who needs down, refuse to sell them anything, if the person who needs tries to haggle or pay less than is being asked, and so the person with needs gets screwed over more often than not because it is dangerous to even risk trying to haggle or negotiate a better price.
Now obviously a person who relies on prostitution to pay their bills and to just generally live is not in the superior bargaining position compared to the john who use them, who neither need them nor are particularly pressured to use any particular prostitute – not only can johns haggle but they have the ability to dictate terms to the prostitute who has a huge force (hunger, the luxury of having a place to sleep).
Prostitution is clearly a buyer’s market, and prostitutes are sellers, inherently degraded by their lack of power even when their profession is something they’ve entered into by “choice”.
The prostitute needs the money for their survival, and the john merely wants to have sex with a woman, and so a pressure is put on the prostitute to perform when they do not want to and/or how they don’t want to.
Now despite the fact that when a woman is having sex when/how she doesn’t want to, it’s not sex, it’s rape, which is coerced sex, KH still sits stubbornly by the concept that there’s nothing coercive about having sex for money.
Now I think I get what she’s sort of going on about, I do, one you get past the whole fucked up semantics BS, there is the whole “If someone offers you a million dollars to eat shit, you can refuse” thing, no one’s actively forcing the prostitutes to have sex when/how they don’t want to.
Well, except the socio-economic conditions inherent to prostitution of course.
Now the more eagle eyed among you may have noticed that an argument that basically says “Well if she had sex with him and chose to be a prostitute, then she wasn’t raped, she consented” and automatically erases the fact that the prostitute did not want to have sex then/like that, which is always rape, duh.
And yes B|L, this was put forth by a person claiming to be a sex-positive feminist. Sans any of the various contexts that I needed to be informed about after the Bussel flamewar, Bussel sounded like the sort of anti-fem I hear much too often, lording the right to be victimised while slamming feminists with some really randomised citations (that’s the anti-fems btw, after you add in a shit load of context to Bussel you find out that she’s wasn’t actually lording the right to be victimised, she’s just moulitsas). Yes it’s fucked up that I’m more familiar with common anti-fem arguments than Moulitsas feminist ones (I’m looking at you Levy).
But as I was telling my crack dealer this morning, I’m a fucked up kinda gal.
Anyhoo… If a woman isn’t able to consent it’s rape, If she was willing at one point but changes her mind later on, it’s rape if you don’t stop guys, even if she’s a prostitute/pr0nstar/stripper, it’s still rape if she doesn’t want to have sex with you.
DUH!
Now you may have noticed I used a word which usually gets the prostitution legalisers aggravated; “degrade”.
This is not me saying “oh, they have sex for money, they’re being degraded”, I’m saying that someone has to play pretend that they’re enjoying themselves while having sex with a person to whom they are not physically attracted to is being dehumanized.
One of the words used to support various sex-negative concepts under the cover of sex-positive feminism is “empowering”, stripping is “empowering”, being just (as in no life outside of being a stay at home mother, not as in being any kind of mother is something less in and of itself) a stay at home mother who caters to your “manly” guy’s every whim while ignoring your personal wants and needs is “empowering”, being a prostitute is “empowering”.
Now the funny thing is that out of those three, stripping is probably the only one that even approaches being “empowering”, because the thing is that, no one tells her how she does her routines, that’s her choice and her choice alone (I think, I could be wrong), the woman who’s trapped in that abusive marriage (and what else would you call a marriage in which a woman unilaterally takes on the stresses of a family while the husband complains about how she isn’t satisfying his every sexual whim often enough?) and the prostitute don’t’ even have that level of freedom in their “empowering” profession.
Yes yes, I suppose a prostitute can turn down clients, but again there’s that matter of really needing the money that means that’ll happen in extremis only.
And while she’s on the clock she is not herself, not sexually, not personality wise either, a john doesn’t just hire a prostitute’s body for an hour or an evening, he hires her personality as well, she hires someone who’ll laugh at his lame ass jokes and smile and go “oh it’s so big and hard” at appropriate moments.
It’s a trope borne entirely of the abrahamic faiths’ belief in a mind/body duality that creates this idea that sex is a purely physical thing that is somehow separate from the mental/spiritual aspect of a person, it isn’t, it can’t be.
Which is why the term “empowering” is such a classic case of doublethink when used in relation to prostitution, A prostitute is not doing what they want to do sexually, they’re doing what the john wants to do sexually irregardless of what the prostitute feels about that particular act.
It may not be rape if a woman does an act that bores them to tears and through which they have to pretend to be enjoying themselves, but it’s certainly not “empowering”, the precise opposite in fact, it’s dehumanizing.
And the amount of time, work and money that has to go into a prostitute’s body during her career is also another aspect that robs the whole thing of it’s empowering aspect, the closest equivalent to the dehumanizing nature of prostitution is shitty things in the service industry, those bullshit jobs where not smiling at all times when customers are present is a good way to get fired, those jobs are also dehumanizing, no question about it, but at least in most of those jobs I can get off work, and then eat and drink myself fat, or not get a face left because I’m getting old, and the next morning I can go into work, fat or wrinkly or ugly as sin, and as long as I remember to smile between 7 and 6 everyday, I still get paid.
But a prostitute has to go to the gym and stay trim, has to get the cosmetic surgery if possible, otherwise they’ll suffer a drop in customers, and the only empowering thing about either of the service industry jobs, the money you get from them, starts to dry up.
And the higher paid the hooker, the more crap they need to do to stay a high paid hooker, until their bodies are 80% silicon/collagen, 19% water and 1% themselves, at all times.
And as I’ve written previously, another trick oppressive system use is to turn a person from an individual, into a role, a job, a duty.
The Lovage song Sex (I’m a) notes this fact actually, where the chorus has a man going “I’m a man” over and over again, while a woman replies with all the roles she can be, “I’m a bitch”, “I’m a hooker”, I’m a little girl”, “I’m your mother”, “I’m a blue movie” the female half of the dialogue goes, never matching the man’s definitive statement that he’s just “a man.”
The core principle of feminism is that women are people, not roles, not jobs, people, and while people can take on roles when they want to, they can only take on roles as an expression of their personhood, and jobs that gradually subsume more and more of a woman’s personhood beneath their need to earn money, going so far as to disfigure her appearance so that men can better masturbate with her, are not feminist.
Now are y’all ready for the Big, Bad, horse molesting “But” to this whole tawdry affair?
But…
None of that matters a damn in the prostitution legalisation debate.
Whether prostitution is legalised has to be all about whether legalisation or decriminalisation helps stem and stop abuses in the industry, nothing more and nothing less, that some women decide to have sex for money is irrelevant to the legalisation debate, yes they should be called on their patriarchal bullshit when they call prostitution feminist or sex-positive, but the moral debate that broke out on pandagon has nothing to do with whether prostitution should be legalised, the debate should always be “can this or that legal change help those women who are being abused in an industry that is already illegal but exists anyway?”
And my personal stance is that the answer to that question is highly situational, which is were I feel Dworkin and most prostitution fighters, whether for or against legalisation, err heavily.
Universal attitudes to legalisation/decriminalisation are foolish, I could see it possible that in some locales, prostitution could be legalised and give prostitutes and shit load of much needed legal rights and protections that will be used to their benefit, and legalisation doesn’t forego attacking the root cause of prostitution – patriarchy – not by a long shot.
But then again legalising prostitution anywhere within a few hundred miles of Yale, Harvard or Duke will do nothing more or less than essentially legalise rape, the police simply won’t arrest, the juries won’t convict, the worst possible thing in the world you could do for prostitutes in that particular socio-political environment is legalise prostitution, even decriminalisation would rely too much on the local police not being out and out misogynists who joined the police force because they really like beating poor people with their batons (which they fiddle with constantly).
So it depends, if there is a good reason to think that legalisation in some form will be helpful within a particular social context, then by all means, I’ll have your back.
Just don’t tell me that prostitution is empowering, or feminist, or about you being sexually free, just don’t, I hate people who can’t even be bothered to lie to me well, cheap lies won’t do anything but piss me off.
It’s about the money, so say it’s about the money, there’s no shame in admitting that.
* Because they already had the massive amount of starting capital that is absolutely needed, due to that being how economics works, to make even more money (money being entirely unlike tribbles and all) in our great “meritocracy”, and their bags of inherited cash also allowed them to survive the first couple of false starts, like those times they ran several businesses into the ground through raw incompetence for instance, which strangely enough never get mentioned in those great tirades against the incompetence of poor people that asswaste failure right-wingers are so fond of.
** Of course this is largely true, when you can throw money at the politicians to change the laws so that all those handy cost saving schemes (like incredibly lax health and safety regulations) are perfectly legal, not to mention hire the lawyers and accountants who know all the little legal loopholes that enable them to never pay taxes and to avoid breaking the letter of the law while bending the law’s (and the workers’) spirit into crazy pretzel shapes that inexplicably never quite break it (though onlookers are always amazed that it doesn’t, “how can anyone or thing contort themselves like that?” they often ask, as though the answer is ever going to be anything other than “because they’re paid to hyuk hyuk hyuk…”) and thus the rich, strangely enough, never quite break the law.
† Who seem to go to way too many pride parades and gay bars than would seem credible if the constant paedophilic obsession of homophobes is to be believed. One can only assume that wingers raise their children in gay leather bars. Actually, now that I think about it, that would explain rather a lot really.
‡ I’m thinking of using Kos’ name as a term to replace the morally questionable terms “moron”, “idiot”, “retard”, “mong” and “dumb”, as in “my god, that was really moulitsas” or “Stop being moulitsas and get a move on”. To put it into a relative context, the bush administration is really really, incredibly moulitsa.
269 Responses to “Blow is totally feminist though”
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Yours is a nice socialist take on the issue, and I like how you manage to it from that point of view.
A word on the autonomy of strippers to do their routines; most strip clubs have strict guidelines on what’s expected of a stripper in her stage act. Usually this looks like stipulations on how many pieces of clothing have to be removed by certain points in the set, and it often spills into her off-stage time with quotas on how many drinks she has to try and make men purchase for her.
The most common coercion is the desperation of other strippers, because if men know they can get their dicks sucked during a private dance with one stripper then the others are forced to do more to compete for men’s money. As the woman in this article points out, “I can’t tell you how many times I have struggled to pay my stage fees after a night of hearing, ‘Why should I get a lap dance from you when another girl will give me oral sex for the same price?’ “ I used to get served free beer in a strip club so I hung out there a lot in my teens, and I heard one girl after another say what she wouldn’t do only to see them squat onto men’s opened beer bottles and shove a high heeled shoe into her vagina when the money men (in the shoe case three boys) offered was too much to pass up.
For all its many good points, your essay would be stronger if it included discussion of pimps and drug dealers, often one and the same. It’s estimated 90% of prostitutes in the United States are pimped out and the role of drug addictions in forcing women into prostitution cannot be overstated as substance addictions are almost a universal in prostitution. A colleague of mine who works with prostituted women in England is convinced that without proper drug treatment there can be little headway made in helping prostitutes meet their goal of getting out of the life because the pimps have got them hooked.
The fabulous Jill Sobule has a song on her most recent album about the sex trafficking problem in Tel Aviv and drug addiction:
I dream of my country
I think of my mother
I send her what I can
She thinks I’m a waitress
She’s proud I’m a waitress
In the promised land
They promised me work
And they promised me TV
They promised I’d never get bored
I’m back on the stairway
I’m higher than ever
They promised that I could get more
Good post. I’m not sure what KH’s narrow definition of coercion was, and I’m unwilling to trawl all the way through that thread to find out.
The thing with prostitution for me is that proponents of legalisation alwalys seem to be conjuring an image of Laurie from the first series of the West Wing, but my mental image is always more in terms of human trafficking and malnourished teenagers.
Thank you R. Mildred.
In spite of the fact that each of these women knew the women gone missing before her had probably been murdered by a john, she still turned up to her stroll. That’s choice? Two pages of missing, murdered prostitutes from ONE small neighbourhood in one city in one short defined period of time. Take a look at these faces. See the empowerment.
http://www.missingpeople.net/
“And while she’s on the clock she is not herself, not sexually, not personality wise either, a john doesn’t just hire a prostitute’s body for an hour or an evening, he hires her personality as well, she hires someone who’ll laugh at his lame ass jokes and smile and go “oh it’s so big and hard” at appropriate moments.”
She still has to pay for her own dinner though. I was watching one those titillating documentaries that have become so popular on British TV recently, which are supposedly examinations of prostitution, escorting, swinging or whatever but are really an excuse to get porn and sexploitation on our TV screens late at night. Anyhow they interviewed an escort and her john who had hired her out for four hours. After talking warmly about the girlfriend experience he was having and how he would like to try a few different things with her “maybe anal sex”, it turned out the john had made her split the bill. It just summed up how these men view the women they use: he’s happy to stick his dick up her ass, but feed her, no way.
Very nicely argued, R Mildred. Your arguments were wasted on KH.
I’m not so sure that in all contexts it’s a buyer’s market. even in Asia, where men I’ve known have gone to the bars to find what is euphemistically called “bar girls,” it is very obvious that, if you don’t do things their way, it’s the highway. E.g you never just walk in and wave cash, not in these establishments. (there are plenty where you do, though). In the ones sailors frequent, you go in and you engage in a courtship ritual of sorts.
You must buy overpriced, watered down fruity drinks, of which the girl gets a cut. You don’t touch unless you are invited. You are dangerously drunk? Mamasan throws you out. You otherwise simply look ugly, if the girl, in talking with you while drinking, spies someone more attractive, you’re history. Someone else will come along, of course. But she’s not your first choice.’
And, of course, what gets missed in _all_ of this, is not that we think that the radfems are zeroed in on people having *sex* for money, but that they are zeroed in on that and won’t explain or don’t persuade others why this matters in a way that makes it far more important to worry about that than to worry about people — all of us — who are forced to work at anything for money every day.
we all are forced to work for money.
now, personally? I know why the radfems feel this way. They think that porn, prostitution, and rape are the belts that power the engine of Patriarchy.
Great!
I really don’t have anything to say because we fundamentally disagree. We don’t share one iota of anything that is worth getting together and having a beer over.
I dont’ feel bad about that at all because i feel that the things I do are helping make a better world. And all the pissing and moaning from pony, sam, etc. about my lack of feminist street cred means exactly what I paid for their opinion: 0$
They don’t respect me, my heart is shattered and broken.
And I can feel quite comfortable about all that because I have taken the time to figure out how they think. They don’t bother to do the same. Thus, I get the added bonus of knowing that I am taking the high road and they aren’t. They in trun get to feel smug by mischaracterizing our positions and refusing to listen. The old engaged falliblistic pluralism post I made on the blog in response to the Alas sex wars recently.
And, disillusioned though I may be, I will go to my early grave knowing that the side that is at least trying to hold the door for reconciliation — as shot through with msitaken and hurthful rheotric as it is sometimes — is doing a better service to feminist goals than are those who shut the door and pretend that it is open, if only we would agree with their views.
Thank you for this post, R. Mildred.
In addition to Delphyne’s comment, I’d like to stress that, as is often but rightly said, prostituters also buy something else from the women they use: their silence. It is that silence that allows them to impunibly keep being invisible “johns”.
French photographer Marc Helleboid, who did an exhibition about “the clients in question” explained how hard it had been to convince his subjects to let him capture even their shadow (one of them wouldn’t even let him photograph his hands). A work on silence and obscurity.
Compare this to the thousands of voyeuristic albums and documentaries who show prostituted women under every angle, and you have the very image of the power imbalance inherent to sexual exploitation.
“prostituters?”
>who the other two groups think hate prostitution because prostitutes have sex for money, whereas they actually hate prostitution because prostitutes have sex for money.>
Not really, no. Well, again, I can only speak for myself: I can certainly see the socioeconomic argument much better; thing is, quite a lot of kinds of work (to greater or lesser degrees, arguably) suck quite badly; are degrading and underpaid and dangerous and dehumanizing. And some lines arguably are open to greater levels of exploitation and abuse than others. As you point out, migrant work, for one; or let’s say working the kill floor at a slaughterhouse; or hello the garment industry.
Yet no one singles out the -kind- of work, in these instances; well, maybe some vegetarians/animal rights activists wrt the slaughterhouse I suppose. But still: we gotta eat; we gotta wear clothes; and probably someone -has to- buy all those little trinkets that are made in some locked warehouse in a Third World country I expect.
> inherently degraded by their lack of power
–I mean, who the fucking fuck -isn’t?-
Yet sex is -different.- Different different different; and no, I do not believe that murky shit about the sex itself isn’t factoring in the anti-arguments. How could it not do? We’re as steeped in “sex-negativity,” culture-wise, as we are with misogyny and racism and classism and everything else.
-My- problem is when people–particularly feminists–”speak for” sex workers when they’re clearly more than capable of speaking for themselves. And I’m far from convinced that much of the sheer nastiness that was happening there and elsewhere wasn’t in fact because these womens’ very existence offended some people and still does.
I’m more than willing to believe that the bulk of sex work is -not- happy happy joy joy; hell, I hear as much from a number of sex workers. But it’s really aggravating to witness the ways in which these -people- become -symbols.- If nothing else, how ’bout stepping back and letting the women who’re actually -doing- the work speak for their damn selves for five minutes?
My adaptation of prostitueurs (as opposed to prostitué(e)s), a term used by abolitionist feminists in Québec and France. Without prostituters (pimps and johns), there are no prostituted (women, children, men).
RM,
So, if I’m following your argument correctly, the starting point would be “coercion is coercion whether it’s physical or economical”. Since a woman is raped whenever she is coerced into having sex that she would not otherwise have, the sex that prostitutes have out of need for money is always rape.
However, it seems to me that if we follow that logic through, we can say that “forced labour or servitude occurs whenever a person does work that they would not otherwise do”, which seems to me to be squarely in line with your characterization of rape. If that is true, then any work that people do solely to get money is unfree work. Therefore, for example, the miserable phone survey job that I only work because I need the money to feed myself is morally equivalent to having a gun shoved in my back to force me to work.
Given the premises that lead you to the first conclusion, the second one seems to me to necessarily follow. Would you agree, or is there some point in there where you would say the argument breaks down, such that it is true for prostitutes, but not for people in any other type of work?
Re: The idea that prostitution = rape because its sex that the prostitute doesn’t want to have.
– I’m sorry, but there is consent. If a prostitute says, “I’ll do Y for X amount of money”, she has has consented to sex under those conditions. Consent while demanding that certain preconditions are met, otherwise sex isn’t going to happen, is still consent.
– OK, but supposedly a prostitute simply can’t refuse any offer of money for sex, because they’re supposedly all so strung out, so poor, so psychologically desperate, that tricks have total power over them. The thing is, that really isn’t true about all prostitutes or all sex workers. It might be true of the kind of prostitutes interviewed by Melissa Farley, but the thing is, that is far from representative of all prostitutes. Of course, getting the antis to admit that maybe Farely was looking at only the poorest most desperate sex workers and that maybe it can’t be extrapolated out to the entire sex industry is like getting Young Earth Creationists to admit that they don’t really have proof the Earth is only 4000 years old. No use arguing with people who believe they’re not only entitled to their own opinion, but their own facts as well.
Re: The idea that prostitution = rape because its sex that the prostitute doesn’t want to have.
– I’m sorry, but there is consent. If a prostitute says, “I’ll do Y for X amount of money”, she has has consented to sex under those conditions. Consent while demanding that certain preconditions are met, otherwise sex isn’t going to happen, is still consent.
Not that simple, having already made the agreement, she would have to be insanely secure in her financial situation to even try to stop the sexual encounter midway through if she changed her mind midway through the preagreed activity.
And if she’s having sex she doesn’t want to do, it’s rape, by definition. And if you have sex for money often enough, and your ability to continue eating is incumbent on you having sex with people for money, such a situation will happen, because a prostitute only has as much power to refuse a client as she has savings in the bank.
And for the higher paid hookers, who’s client base is even more dependent on word of mouth than the lower paid ones, pressure is on to make sure that every one of her clients goes away satisfied, for the referrals, so she’ll bite her lip and shut up if it’s not too horrible.
And then when you ask her a few weeks later whether she enjoys her work, the incident when she was raped but didn’t say anything won’t be mentioned strangely enough, due to the most basic form of selection bias, why would anyone want to focus on that when thinking of their day job? She’ll still have to it tommorrow because rents due soon, and anyway, she didn’t say anything at the time so maybe there was nothing wrong eh? Life’s not all peaches and cream after all… And so the next time it happens (and it will happen again, because life isn’t all peaches and cream) she’ll continue to stay quiet, and the time after that, and so on and so forth.
And this is the well off prostitutes and escorts remember, so well off that their work isn’t always non-consensual. And when the most notable thing is that some women in a profession aren’t always raped and physically forced into that profession, I some how find myself unable to really say: “Yes, this is a highly feminist profession and should be made legal at once!”
Maybe I’m just deficient in someway though.
Of course, getting the antis to admit that maybe Farely was looking at only the poorest most desperate sex workers and that maybe it can’t be extrapolated out to the entire sex industry is like getting Young Earth Creationists to admit that they don’t really have proof the Earth is only 4000 years old. No use arguing with people who believe they’re not only entitled to their own opinion, but their own facts as well.
So do the antis make up the interviews with the poorest prostitutes? because otherwise the last sentence is a non-sequitur.
And tell me: why on earth would we make laws that make the lives of people who say their life is pretty good already easier while ignoring the rampant abuse of their less well off sisters?
generally speaking, making laws that aren’t set clearly to help the worst off, those who are most prone to abuse First, and then worry about how those laws affect those who aren’t the eternally screwed over and pissed on later, if you have time, is getting it all assbackwards – That’s why I state that the moral arguement in hte legalisation/decriminalisation debates is a redherring regardless of who’s right, it doesn’t matter if such activities are right or wrong (the moral debate is just interesting, because it allows me to examine my preconceptions and join up the oppressive dots in various ways), what matters is if such laws will help the most at risk, help protect them somehow where they are currently unprotected from the social acceptance of sex work as “neccesary”.
That’s why antis don’t really give the well off prostitutes much time, because who cares if one woman earns $450 an hour? What does that have to do with the unarguable problem here, the existence of lotsa 20 bucks a blow crackwhores who are violently abused by their pimps and their johns?
And come on, the whole of the pro’s arguement is based on them enjoying their work so much, and it being so great, illegalisation hardly seems to be hurting them at all dammit (and I’m really disappointed about that btw, how dare high class whores not suffer for having sex), so what’s their problem? (Aside from social validation of course – and they can get in line behind the homosexuals, enviromentalists and communists if that’s their problem.)
I’m sure there are multiple layers of irony in that last para, but I’m just too tired to go there right now.
Here’s my opinion from the blue, blue sky right now:
1) I’m willing to listen to any criticism of the industry, etc., but only from the sex workers themselves; at minimum, from people who used to do it. That includes people who are currently abolitionists; however, any dovetailing of an anti-prostitution agenda with any other anti-some-other-aspect of sexuality a la radfem automatically loses credibility points for me.
2) I refuse to “otherize” sex workers, whether by blaming, shaming, or condescension. They get enough of that red-letter shit as it is; I fail to see how adding to that stigmatization in -any- way furthers a feminist agenda.
them’s my sentiments and I’m sticking by ‘em.
…which, on that note, I am reading at least one woman who -does- seem to think that law enforcement is in fact a problem; I tend to take her word for it.
And anyway this maketh not the sense to me: if you’re saying prostitution runs rampant regardless of the law, which it clearly does, then whom exactly is it harming if you decriminalize? The women? Really. I mean, how exactly is this supposed to work? As it is, if you’re abused on the job you have no legal recourse; no union; no insurance; no “rights” and regulations.
Working at this here computer is boring as shit but not degrading because I’m not pretending to work.
Y’all take your time figuring that out.
…and I’m reading another woman who has no particular truck with the women who find stripping “empowering;” as with everything, it comes down to class; she makes no bones that it -is- all about the money for her, that she and her co-workers (stripping) view the clients quite cynically; that she does find it dehumanizing on the whole.
And yet she’s also a far cry from the image of the helpless drudge that keeps cropping up in the anti’s portrait-painting: she’s funny and tough and smart and likes sex (yeah, the rough, “degrading” stuff, too) just fine, thank you. and just got her own apartment for the first time. and seems to agree that in fact as problematic as her line of work is, she sees plenty of parallels with other badly-paid, exploitive lines of work that require lots of contact with dodgy people. Substance abuse counselling, say.
The only difference is that yes, once you’ve worked in the “industry” there is a red-line stigma circle around you.
which personally I am thinking that all the pissing and moaning and violin-backed handwringing and talking right over the actual people and crap about “human fleshlights” and other lovely imagery used by the folks supposedly -on their side-? Doesn’t help. Not one little tiny teeny bit.
I’d post the link here if I didn’t think it’d attract the usual creepy folks bent on proselytizing.
or calling her a “man,” or a patriarchy-enabler, or whatever the fuck else excuse it is for not actually just sitting down and shutting the hell up and listening for five seconds.
and nowhere in there is there any suggestion that yes, please, keep it illegal; certainly a story about a recent trip to the hospital without insurance kind of suggests otherwise, at minimum.
The latter of which, frankly, if y’all could let the fuck up on who blows whom and what the semiotics of this or that or the other means long enough to notice, hey, health insurance! that’s a problem for everybody! including and maybe especially lots and lots and lots of women! not to mention the working classes! gee, maybe THAT might be a feminist issue we could all get behind! –that, that, you know, could be interesting.
but christ jesus forbid we actually all unite on anything. ever. Peoples’ Front of Judea, VIVA!
I’m not interested in any discourse with people who talk like you do Belle, name-calling and defamining, dismissive remarks and talking *about* people behind their backs.
You’ve got nothing to say I’m interested in hearing. Nothing to add that is informed on the situation but this one sex trade friend whom you keep waving around. I’ve done both, and I can speak without fear that my reputation as a raging sexbot will be affected by telling the truth.
Personally I had hoped for law school. But I hear that’s a crapper too. Still, it’s a lot better than sucking some guy’s dick and putting on a show for people like you so you can cling to your illusions.
“And if she’s having sex she doesn’t want to do, it’s rape, by definition. And if you have sex for money often enough, and your ability to continue eating is incumbent on you having sex with people for money, such a situation will happen, because a prostitute only has as much power to refuse a client as she has savings in the bank.”
“And for the higher paid hookers, who’s client base is even more dependent on word of mouth than the lower paid ones, pressure is on to make sure that every one of her clients goes away satisfied, for the referrals, so she’ll bite her lip and shut up if it’s not too horrible.”
Well, its apparent that you have a very broad definition of “rape”. Apparently, if a prostitute isn’t enjoying every minute of it but nonetheless consents to go along with it because, well that’s the nature of the job, she’s being raped. Never mind that said prostitute herself might not define what happened as rape or as non-consensual, simply as not enjoyable.
“So do the antis make up the interviews with the poorest prostitutes? because otherwise the last sentence is a non-sequitur.”
Not a non-sequitor in the least. No I don’t think they made up the results of the study, and the findings are probably true for the groups that they studied. The problem is, you’re simply don’t understand or are willfully ignoring the selection bias inherent in that study. The study was only of the poorest, most desperate street prostitutes, yet the study failed to provide any proof that 1) this represents most prostitution, and 2) that the study could be generalized to other populations of sex workers. Nevertheless, this study is generalized to be the final word on all sex work, even situations quite remote from the ones in the study. This is what I mean by cherry-picking your own “facts”.
“That’s why antis don’t really give the well off prostitutes much time, because who cares if one woman earns $450 an hour? What does that have to do with the unarguable problem here, the existence of lotsa 20 bucks a blow crackwhores who are violently abused by their pimps and their johns?”
I have yet to see any proof that 20 bucks a blow crackwhores are more common than the $300/hour escorts. That’s not a hypothetical – if I wanted to hook up with a prostitute right now, I’d go over the listings on a site like Lovings.com, not go driving around looking for crack addicts to abuse.
“And tell me: why on earth would we make laws that make the lives of people who say their life is pretty good already easier while ignoring the rampant abuse of their less well off sisters?”
“generally speaking, making laws that aren’t set clearly to help the worst off, those who are most prone to abuse First, and then worry about how those laws affect those who aren’t the eternally screwed over and pissed on later, if you have time, is getting it all assbackwards”
I’m not sure exactly what laws you’re advocating, but if you’re saying that we need laws that willfully conflate prostitution that is freely entered into with outright sexual slavery, then you’re being more than a little heavy-handed. And if you’re deliberately being heavy-handed, deliberately coming down hard on sex workers “who’s life is pretty good” or their clients, then I think it speaks volumes about your motives, which seem to be about something other than simply helping oppressed women.
Rmildred:
“So do the antis make up the interviews with the poorest prostitutes? because otherwise the last sentence is a non-sequitur.”
No one’s saying that they make it up whole cloth. IACBlue was talking about misrepresenting the experiences of street prostitutes as if they are the experiences of all sex workers.
Even when you’re talking the third world, you’re talking vastly different experiences. But boy, everyone surely likes to orientalize and believe that ever single third world sex worker is some kind of helpless victim.
My neighbor, Norma, came here as a mail order bride. Most of her friends were sex workers in the Philipines. While they often talked about wanting to meet an American and come to the states, about half of her friends, when they had the opportunity, simply didn’t do it. For all kinds of reasons, no doubt. But even when meeting men who fell in love and gave them an engagement ring, the difficulty of leaving their homeland was too much to bear. Or, they simply realized they liked thier lives: the independence and modernity compared of living in the city and having things like television, make up, entertainment, and things they considered sophisticated compared to live in rural Philipine villages.
I’m reminded also of a neighbor from Guam who worked as a ‘long time’ girl with a business man who made frequent trips to Guam on business. he’d buy her time for a week to a month. No, he didn’t bang her 24/7. instead, he did things like go on picnics with her extended family, take her out dancing, yadda yadda.
He wanted someone with whom to do these things and he cared about whether she got off.
But you wouldn’t know that kind of thing existed in, of all places, the third world.
Who knows what is representative. And we’ll never know if no one wants to go out and actually do the reeding and research — and listening.. I operate under the assumption that the bulk of prostitution is not at all happy happy joy joy. But what is annoying is the way that, for ideological reasons, people want to smother a complex picture of the lives of women and the operations of capitalism, racism, and patriarchy.
–
Since no one *can* know what is likely to happen under decrim or legalization, the answer is to work with the sex workers to find out what *they* want.
That is what Carol Hanish meant by consciousness raising. Get to gether with women, talk about experiences and figure out what in those experiences were *political problems*. Then, work together to come up with solutions.
If the fear is that legalization will turn out to help only those who are already doing well, then the answer is to get off our asses and form activist networks, organizations, etc that can prevent that.
One answer might be to establish a licensing fee and all the funds will be to form a professional association/union (modeled on the work of feminists who talk about service type unions work considered conventionally women’s work). The license fee would be very modest and the professional association would be run by sex workers themselves, not do gooder white middle class feminists who come in and run it for the good of the working girls.
Pony, you’ve said really nasty shit to friends of mine as well; it goes both ways. And nothing on the public Internets is “behind one’s back.” I am capable of having more than one feeling about any given person at once. I also sometimes change my mind. And back again, as well.
And it’s actually a number of friends and acquaintances, for the record, but whatthefuckever.
Bull. I have no idea who your friends are. As for really nasty shit? It was directed to the individual, or to the issue; it was about the individual or the ISSUE; it was in response to a request for comment or…?
Learn to tell the difference between a personal insult and rhetorical style. If you would, you’d have a lot less problem with certain posters, and IBTP overall.
>I have no idea who your friends are.
No, dear, I know you don’t. But -I- do.
The crack whores weren’t born crack whores. Most of them got that way for two reasons:
The pimps addict them, and those that aren’t eventually addict themselves in order to live with what they’re doing, in order to be ABLE to do what they’re doing. Yes even the $300 an hour whores. LOL what a joke. You hold that out like their some kind of something to look up to. They sliiiiiiiide, and disappear, get STDs, fat, saggy tits. They were only $300 a day whores for a year of at all. They get older, they get beaten and it doesn’t heal right or the plastic surgeon can’t fix it quite good enough and they have to do things they don’t want to to do to get their next hit. And they become the women in the link I posted.
I’m getting the feeling you’ve got a real sickening classist attitude here. There’s those Pretty Woman $300 a day whores and then there’s those disgutin’ crack whores, you think.
They’re the same woman. Your sister, both of you a member of the sex class.
I might think you had a point Pony, if I thought you knew what the hell you were talking about. Where’s your evidence that said $300/hour escorts are run by pimps? Where’s your evidence that escorts inevitably turn into addicted street prostitutes? Are you speaking from your own experience or that of somebody you know? I think you’re just confusing any worst-case scenarios that you can dream up with the actual facts about escorting.
“I’m getting the feeling you’ve got a real sickening classist attitude here.”
And I get the feeling that you’re a nasty little shit that uses a smug sense of moral superiority as an excuse to talk down to people. Am I supposed to feel in some way shamed by your spiteful and shitty response? I feel quite the opposite, actually.
Please, do tell me more about what I think.
slip. she had–well, I’m sure she’ll tell you herself what her experience was.
doesn’t especially preclude the rest of your speculation, though.
and really, I shouldn’t have bothered. oh, well.
I’ll have to tell my male acquaintances who work as “sacred intimates” that they’re–well, what is it now? honorary members of the sex class? incipient crack hos? nonexistent? irrelevant?
…and finally, i love that someone who worships at the altar of Twisty is calling someone -else- on their classism (which I no doubt have; but at least I’ve never explained to the rest of the world that “no one can afford to have kids;” at least not if we all want to keep dining in four-star restaurants we can’t. “we.”)
Bitch|Lab threw up: “IACBlue was talking about misrepresenting the experiences of street prostitutes as if they are the experiences of all sex workers.”, proving her willful refusal to bother actually looking at decades worth of available research. I’ll ask again for someone to tell me why they think Isin Baral, Merab Kiremire, Ufuk Sezgin, and Melissa Farley were not allowed to interview legal prostitutes in a legal Turkish brothel and to confront what the very fact that they tried to conduct interviews in a legal brothel means to the illogical, uneducated lies being spread about researchers cherry-picking street prostitutes. And that’s just one study confirming the results of hundreds of studies on prostitution before it, but it happens to be one recent study posted online.
In other words, you’re wrong, Bitch|Lab, about your belief in a grand conspiracy among hundreds of prostitution researchers from around the world over decades to intentionally skew their research out of their deep-seated hatred of sex and/or prostitutes.
What’s even more amazing is that the prostitute-hatred you’re only too happy to slap onto me and hundreds of social workers, feminists, psychiatrists, domestic violence counselors, social researchers, AIDS activists and women’s rights NGO workers is a prostitute-hatred you resolutely refuse to attach to men who use prostitutes. It seems in your worldview, everyone, including most international feminists, harbors intense sex negativity and hatred of sex workers except pro-prostitution feminists like you and prostitute-using men.
You want people to believe researchers, social workers and non-pro-pornstitution feminists always hate sex workers but tricking men don’t and can often be very kind and sweet and generous. The sheer outrageousness of that sentiment stands as its own testament.
While I’m here, let me just say that I’m very tired of the very tired argument that any attempts to help the overwhelming majority of prostituting people who say they want out immediately will result in prostitution “going underground”. This is true of every criminal enterprise that hurts people, but it’s less true for prostitution than most other crimes.
I’ve been studying weapons trafficking routes because they’re often similar to human trafficking routes, and what I’ve seen is that there’s not a huge market for men seeking to purchase $50,000 AK47s or other advanced military weaponry. There are no multi-page ads for military weaponry in the Village Voice, no multi-page “weapons” section in the phone book advertising rocket launchers. Weapons trafficking is as underground as underground gets because, unlike prostitution, it does not rely on a steady stream of income from the average working class man. Prostitution can never go as underground as weapons trafficking because the bulk of prostitute (ab)users are not wealthy underground fighters/terrorists but the ordinary men in our lives; brothers, husbands, co-workers, fathers, bachelor-party goers, small business owners, grandfathers, actors, boyfriends, college boys, etc.
I sense the real point of the “Don’t do anything or it will go underground!” hysteria is mostly to foist the blame for what prostitute-using men do to prostitutes onto anyone who tries to stop the violence and abuse of the most raped class of women in the world. The implication is that it would be my fault a pimp killed one of his ‘cows’ because I refused to ignore the devastation of women and girls he’s making buckets of money from, and it’s an effective a form of extortion. We’ve got no less than millions of women trapped in circumstances where they are literally held as slaves and raped multiple times every day and the threat from pimps, filtered through the well-greased public relations and media channels of the legal pornstitution industry, is that if anyone tries to help these rape victims then the pimps are really going to torture and rip those bitches to shreds in retaliation and you’ll never find the bodies.
If a 13-year-old girl was being incestuously raped be her violent father who says any attempts to remove her from his custody would result in her murder, is the proper course of action to let him keep raping her? If violent anti-abortion men say they will keep murdering abortion doctors until they get their way of ending the legal right to abortion, does this mean pro-choice feminists have blood on their hands for the murder of Dr. Barnett Slepian because they did not cave to extortionist demands of increased violence in an already very violent atmosphere?
Feminists should not cave to the demands of murderous, raping pimps on the threat that they’ll become more murderous and more raping of the women they’re already murdering and raping in unrivaled numbers, especially when prostitution can’t go as neatly underground as the pimp apologists claim because that’s not where the bulk of tricks are found.
Pony:
Life at Enron
Well, the abortion bit is in fact an interesting parallel, in that I see similarities between the arguments of people who want to outlaw it altogether and the prostitution abolitionists; and the rejoining argument that it’s not gonna go away no matter what you do.
and, too, the very very passionate, imagery-laden arguments, the outrage on behalf of the innocent, the sense of urgency, of good vs. evil…
Sam,
You write excellent pornography. Thanks!
” I’ll ask again for someone to tell me why they think Isin Baral, Merab Kiremire, Ufuk Sezgin, and Melissa Farley were not allowed to interview legal prostitutes in a legal Turkish brothel and to confront what the very fact that they tried to conduct interviews in a legal brothel means to the illogical, uneducated lies being spread about researchers cherry-picking street prostitutes. ”
Total non sequitur, Sam. Just because they tried to interview women in a legal brothel doesn’t mean they actually did so. And its not like these Turkish brothels were the only legal brothel situations they could have looked at. There’s legal prostitution in Amsterdam, Australia, and Nevada as well.
In any event, I’ll say again that you are overgeneralizing one study to be the final word on any and all sex work situations. The way they went about the study isn’t even the correct way to go about studying a large complex phenomenon, anyway. There should be a number of studies, each involving a different population of sex workers. Only when you actually have convergent data that are true across different areas of sex work can you start validly making generalizations. I’m sorry, but it just doesn’t cut it to say a survey of the poorest street prostitutes can be generalized to escorts, to women in legal brothels, to strippers, to porn actors, or any of the myriad other different kinds of situations under the broad heading of “sex work”. Your response that “well, they tried to talk to some prostitutes in a legal brothel” is simply a non-response.
You say the results replicate other studies of sex workers. Here’s a challenge – find one peer-reviewed study that demonstrates that the findings of the Farley, et al study are also true strippers, porn actors, or escorts.
I also take issue with the sensationalistic claim that most North American sex workers are trafficked in from other countries and not mainly people who were born or already resident here, or that most sex workers are “run” by a pimp. Again, your proof?
You see, without some real numbers or independent verification, I have to take what you say on faith. And quite honestly, considering your clear underlying biases and agenda, I won’t accept a thing from you merely on faith.
Pony…(et all)
Well, I am one of the sex workers Belle speaks to, though not the above mention one, and I have received my fair share of venom from radical feminists despite the fact that I do honestly believe in helping women who want out of any aspect of the profession out, and do my part to help them. However, I do not want out, I do have the luxury of being able to walk out or turn down a job if I want to, and I realize that does make me a lot better off than many women in the sex industry as a whole. I don’t have to put up with bullshit, so I don’t, but I know that is not the case for everyone, not by a long shot. However, there is the tendancy on the radical side to only look at the misfortune of the street level prostitute or woman who was forced into any other aspect of the business (stripping, porn) and use them, and them alone, as the ‘image of the sex worker’; desperate, abused, often drug addicted and under educated and subject to countless acts of degradation and rape. Well, not all of us are in that boat…and those who are not are unlikely to subject ourselves to statistical studies or interviews or even talk about anything because of the legality issues, the immediate judgement, and the basic disrespect we receive from just about everyone, including our so-called “sisters” who only have our “best interests in mind”…
If that really were the case then our ’sisters’ would not insult, downgrade, attack and dehumanize us for NOT fitting the stereotype they are looking to propogate as the whole of the women involved in the sex industry, which is exactly what happens. I’ve been treated worse by anti-sex work proponants and radical feminists than by any guy who ever paid for ‘access to my body’, and that is the flat out truth.
And personally, I would love to have insurance!
Wouldn’t we all…
Since Sam is so fond of linking to Farley’s study, its only right that I should point to a journal article critiquing it:
“Flawed Theory and Method in Studies of Prostitution Violence Against Women” by Ronald Weitzer (Violence Against Women 1(7): 934–949, July 2005).
ICB: I am already stealing that link for my blog… (swipe!) Thank you!
Weitzer:
“strangled (20%vs.6%)”
What job apart from prostitution leaves you open to a six percent possibility of being strangled in a six month period”
Anybody?
Then there’s the 14% chance of being slapped, punched or kicked. Of course that’s off-street prostitution, street prostitutes have a 47% chance of that happening to them in a six month period.
“slapped, punched, or kicked (47% vs. 14%)” Weitzer, 2005
That’s a great link IACB.
“What job apart from prostitution leaves you open to a six percent possibility of being strangled in a six month period”
prison guard?
orderly at behavioral health facility?
schoolteacher?
housewife?
(ok – that was in bad taste…but during one particularly bleak 7 year period I averaged about one strangling-to-blackout every six to eight months.)
I’m sure someone has statistics somewhere.
AP:
Oh, go ahead and add ANY employee at a prison or behavioral health facility…
Renegade and anti-princess;
Cite? We have Weitzer’s own figures here for the prostitutes strangulation, let’s have yours now for those occupations.
And yes, Curious; Thanks for that study.
So that’s the kind of science it takes to get a Masters in biology!
Six percent of prison guards and teachers get strangled every six months? You’re being funny. Except you’re not funny at all.
delphyne:
no one is saying there is no violence in the realm of the sex industry, in fact, most people admit there are many sex workers who are treated badly, often. however, they do not represent ALL sex workers, especially those considered “higher end” or those working by choice, whose main problem is if not the often outright illegal nature of their work, then the oh, failure of others to see them as people capable of making career choices for themselves.
To be rather blunt and callous about it, if I decide, willingly, to be a cop, I know full well it is possible I will be hurt, maybe even killed, by a bad or insane person. You think that women who do choose any aspect of sex work do not have the same thought? You bet we do.
then whom exactly is it harming if you decriminalize? The women?
RICO laws are the only thing that allow the police to attack the large pimping rings – there’s a wonderful PDF on the ‘nets somewhere about a huge bust in, I think it was Atlanta, that used RICO laws on some pimp who’s AKA was batman.
The prostitutes who pimps keep are generally so dependant on the prostitution ring and so afraid of being punished in someway that IIRC, Batman would often get his more privelaged hookers to administer punishments, largely in the form of physical beatings. Expectin the prostitutes themselves to complain loudly enough about mistreatment, and then for the police to actually care or not be in the pockets of the pimps to actually help the abused prostitutes
full legalisation is a tricky tight rope to walk, it has to be the right kind of legalisation, one that is appropriate to the social conditions that the legalisation is being applied to. Which means that there will be situations in which it won’t be applicable what so ever – large areas of hte middle east for instance, or Utah.
Decriminalisation makes tons of sense and is hell of a lot easier to apply – punishing prostitutes for getting caught upin the rape culture never made much sense except as a way for society to feel good that it’s looking like it’s keeping the sluts in check.
Oh, go ahead and add ANY employee at a prison or behavioral health facility…
But they all get rape privelages so it doesn’t count, if prostitutes get the right to rape their johns as a side benefit of their professions then fine, they’re comparable.
http://www.paramedic.org.uk/news_archive/2003/12/News_Item.2003-12-31.2031/view
http://www.icn.ch/matters_violence.htm
Violence against women is not limited to sex workers…how about nurses? Or someone who just happens to be female? Or, well, you do not even have to be female, you just need to work in a dangerous field…like…medicine???
Not good enough Renegade. The comparison was strangulation. We all know there’s violence.
Cite EXACTLY.
And in order to know if your comparison is a good one Renegade, please also don’t neglect to add if there were circle jerks going on while the physicians and nurses were performing…er…working.
R. Mildred,
I think you are referring to this (via Rad Geek).
Quote of note:
Pony-
It’s not a contest. I have already agreed that violence occurs in sex work. I (and others) have also stated violence occurs in other more mainstream professions as well, and it does. I do not see much difference between someone getting strangled and someone getting their trachea punched in, sorry. Violence is violence.
And the main point of iamcuriousblues linked study is that often studies used to fuel certain arguements are biased or far from fully accurate, which is true, on both sides, but it seems you all missed that part.
Iamcuriousblue, you avoided the two points in bringing up the pimp/manager refusal by not answering the question I posed. Why do you tnink they were turned away from the legal brothel when 1) it is claimed researchers were seeking out the most abused prostitutes but surely those will not be found in a legal brothel and 2) legalization is supposed to make prostitution more open to checks and regulation but that has most certainly not been the results of prostitution legalization in Turkey?
Renegade Evolution, I would like to respond to you more fully but the last time a sex worker blogger told me, “Take my life as an example, please” I made the mistake of doing just that and got called all sorts of nasty names for it. Thanks but no thanks on that lose-lose proposal, I’ll stick to not overly concerning myself with individual anecdotes as much as with the global portrait of prostitution as a whole and how that plays out on average to women’s great detriment.
“I also take issue with the sensationalistic claim that most North American sex workers are trafficked in from other countries
Where do you think this was stated, because I’m pretty sure it wasn’t?
On the mud flung wildly on the wall that is the comparison of prison guards, psycho ward patients, and schoolkids:
Prisoners and mental patients are being held against their will by people they would rather be 1,000 miles away from and never have to see again. Tricks pay explicitly to bring prostituted women closer to them so they can enjoy doling out the violence they had in mind when soliciting. Prisoners, patients, schoolkids may lash out at power-wielding authority figures because they are held captive in a powerless position, but tricks use their powerful position to bring women to him as he commands the ability to inflict abuses on powerless others.
I know why prisoners get violent at their jailors, but why men get so routinely murderous of the women they demand play the role of ever-ready sexbot whores is beyond my comprehension unless I put it into the same misogynist framework that makes men think less of women who dress sexy. This duality of men wanting sexy women and sexy pay-per-fuck prostitutes around and then despising them to the point of violent-suffused hatred when women agree to provide The Sexy that men demand is where I think the crux of the prostitution debate lies.
“Weitzer:
“strangled (20%vs.6%)”
What job apart from prostitution leaves you open to a six percent possibility of being strangled in a six month period””
Where are you getting the “six month period” part? That’s nowhere in the Weitzer paper. The statistics by Church, et al and Lowman & Fraser that Weitzer is quoting refer, if I’m not mistaken, to prostitutes who have ever experienced these kinds of violence on the job.
No *I* didn’t miss anything. That’s the point of my comment;
Weitzer shit his pants.
Renegade Evolution,
what iamcuriousblue linked to is not a study, it is a “commentary” (in Ronald Weiger’s own words) on various articles and studies about prostitution.
Sorry: Weitzer, not Weiger.
“Violence occurs” is not the same as “there is a much higher (or lower) risk, on average, for violence to occur”. Hence the necessity to have statistical evidence.
Jimmy: you are correct, it is a compilation of several studies, my bad, I appologize for the miss wording. It happens.
Sam:
“I would like to respond to you more fully but the last time a sex worker blogger told me, “Take my life as an example, please” I made the mistake of doing just that and got called all sorts of nasty names for it. Thanks but no thanks…”
Well, I generally try to avoid name calling. I, like everyone else here in the Peoples Republic of Bloglandia, speak my mind and take crap for it. Nothing new. I merely stand by the fact that while there are sex workers who are hurt and treated badly and forced into it, there are sex workers who are not, and one cross section of sex workers is rarely indicative of the lives of all of them.
Since every study ever done on prostitution reveals the immense amount of violence prostitutes face compared with other populations, is Wietzer claiming there has never been any quality research on prostitution? That’s specious, and it reminds me of blowhards who say stuff like, “I’m neither right nor left politically, I’m above all that” in its easy curmudgeonly thrashing of everything and everybody else as inferior to their glorious selves.
I was expecting the Wietzer commentary to be really good but it wasn’t. All research should be heavily scrutinized, but when I got through the limp-wristed contentions to the end and saw him say “it’s not clear if their arguments encompass male and transgender” I knew the jig was up.
The second sentence of the Farley study abstract mentions “We interviewed 475 people (including women, men and the transgendered)” before offering a chart breaking down such details as the study in the USA being 75% women, 13% men and 12% transgendereds. How did Weitzer miss that in his comb-through discrediting attempt?
The beefs Weitzer have with the study are not very substantial, such as the fact that humans are conducting the research and there is no such thing as an unbiased human being. Of course people are biased, and good for the researchers presenting their view that prostitution is violence against women because that’s important to know, but Weitzer becomes a prick when he says ex-prostitutes conducting research can’t be trusted to meet his masculinity-defined impartiality standard where psuedo-scientific claptrap about absolute objectivity is praised so ex-prostitutes can contribute nothing of worth. No doubt Weitzer considers himself a stoic and manly 100% neutral and impartial observer.
Check out this bit of fuckery where Wietzer falsely accuses Farley & Co. of conducting interviews with prostitutes who have been arrested to supposedly seek the most abused samples, but a-okays research done on arrested tricks. No prostitutes were arrested or interviewed in prison in any of the studies criticized.
(the false blame) “Generalizing from prostitutes in custody to the population of prostitutes is also improper,just as with other types of incarcerated offenders.”
(the hypocrisy) “Martin Monto, who has studied more than 2,300 arrested customers, has found that most of them did not accept rape myths or other justifications for violence against women.”
*Here’s another Wietzer assertion that prostituted women are useless for all kinds of info gathering as they are too biased to conduct their own research and too…what?…to have their testimonies about johns believed: (about a study by Janice Raymond on tricks attitudes) “Note that she did not interview even one customer. All of the information about “prostitute users” comes from the “prostituted women.”
The only thing missing on the end of that sentence is, “those unreliable, biased hoes.” Adding insult to injury, Wietzer refers back to the arrested tricks study as proof that the prostitutes Raymond interviewed don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about when it comes to “men’s attitudes and treatment of women in prostitution.”
Also, maybe someone can explain to me how interviewing sex workers in a Thailand “beauty parlor which offered a supportive atmosphere” is somehow cherry-picking the most dejected and abused prostitutes. Why would someone think child prosti-tots, trafficking victims, and drug addicted sex workers would frequent such a beauty parlor more than free-willed sex workers?
Pimps are not an urban legend, people. They are real and they are sadistic, money-hungry motherfuckers.
“Iamcuriousblue, you avoided the two points in bringing up the pimp/manager refusal by not answering the question I posed. Why do you tnink they were turned away from the legal brothel when 1) it is claimed researchers were seeking out the most abused prostitutes but surely those will not be found in a legal brothel and 2) legalization is supposed to make prostitution more open to checks and regulation but that has most certainly not been the results of prostitution legalization in Turkey?”
I don’t know what point you’re trying to make here, Sam. Your implication seems to be that because one legal brothel owner in Turkey refused entry to the researchers, this somehow implicates all legal sex work anywhere, and in some way validates the generalizability of Farley’s study. Those conclusions, of course, are total non sequiturs.
I’m not going to waste my time speculating on what the above brothel owner was trying to hide. Maybe he or she was hiding abuse or maybe he or she just didn’t want unknown people snooping around. I don’t know much about the legal brothel situation in Turkey in general, and would not be surprised if the legal brothel system there was totally corrupt.
In any event, if Farley really wants to study legal brothel workers, there are legal brothels in Nevada, Australia, and several European countries. No indication that Farley or her colleagues even bothered to look elsewhere when they were turned away from the above-mentioned Turkish brothel.
“‘I also take issue with the sensationalistic claim that most North American sex workers are trafficked in from other countries’
Where do you think this was stated, because I’m pretty sure it wasn’t?”
You certainly imply as much here:
“Prostitution can never go as underground as weapons trafficking because the bulk of prostitute (ab)users are not wealthy underground fighters/terrorists but the ordinary men in our lives; brothers, husbands, co-workers, fathers, bachelor-party goers, small business owners, grandfathers, actors, boyfriends, college boys, etc.”
“Renegade Evolution, I would like to respond to you more fully but the last time a sex worker blogger told me, “Take my life as an example, please” I made the mistake of doing just that and got called all sorts of nasty names for it. Thanks but no thanks on that lose-lose proposal, I’ll stick to not overly concerning myself with individual anecdotes as much as with the global portrait of prostitution as a whole and how that plays out on average to women’s great detriment.”
In other words, you’ll willfully ignore anybody who’s experience goes against your preconceived notions about sex work. One person taking their own life as an example is an individual anecdote, but many sex workers telling anti-pornstitution feminists that the antis take on sex work doesn’t speak to their experience adds up to a pattern you shouldn’t be ignoring.
Pony writes:
“No *I* didn’t miss anything. That’s the point of my comment;
Weitzer shit his pants.”
Well, I certainly can’t argue with flawless logic like that. [lol]
“limp-wristed contentions”
and yes, lord knows that’s what feminism’s always been all about, particularly radical feminism: ignoring/dismissing womens’ stories of personal experience in favor of “objective” studies and statistics.
and yes, that makes perfect sense: someone (who, now?) might call you nasty names if you engage the woman seriously; therefore, ignore.
nobody else ever gets called nasty names, mind. and the fact that someone, somewhere else (who, now?) called you a nasty name means that therefore, you can totally dismiss this other person. brilliant!
Full legalisation is a tricky tight rope to walk, it has to be the right kind of legalisation, one that is appropriate to the social conditions that the legalisation is being applied to..
Decriminalisation makes tons of sense and is hell of a lot easier to apply – punishing prostitutes for getting caught upin the rape culture never made much sense except as a way for society to feel good that it’s looking like it’s keeping the sluts in check.>
Well, see, now that I totally agree with.
“Where are you getting the “six month period” part? That’s nowhere in the Weitzer paper. The statistics by Church, et al and Lowman & Fraser that Weitzer is quoting refer, if I’m not mistaken, to prostitutes who have ever experienced these kinds of violence on the job.”
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/322/7285/524?
maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=violence prostitutes&andorexactfulltext=
and&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&sortspec=relevance&resourcetype=HWCIT
“Half of prostitutes working outdoors and over a quarter of those working indoors reported some form of violence by clients in the past six months.”
…that, and of course, -nothing- is going to be a terrific solution all by itself.
as has been mentioned hither and yon, it might be nice to maybe reframe all this in a way that says, okay, say we agree that for many people, prostitution is often no more than the best (if that) of several really grim choices.
so how ’bout focusing more on those other “choices?” and the whole context which leads to that frame-up to begin with?
decriminalize, as you say; work on the much harder task of bringing about a society in which there’s -genuinely- free choice for everyone. -Not- just about how and whether to have sex, either; I mean, because this is the bottom line here, yes? –how one is to eat, provide and clothing and healthcare and other basics for oneself and one’s loved ones; to say nothing of the “higher” needs (nod to Maslow). -Then- maybe we’d have a better idea of whether sex work is “inherently” degrading or not.
meanwhile, i gotta say that overwhelmingly this here looks like just a lot of people working out their own personal shit via the–ooops!—objectified figures of the poor, voiceless prostitutes.
’cause see, if you -ignore- the actual prostitutes speaking up right here? even as you claim to be on the side of the (abstracted, mass body of) all prostitutes/women everywhere? that, too, is objectification.
“The beefs Weitzer have with the study are not very substantial, such as the fact that humans are conducting the research and there is no such thing as an unbiased human being. Of course people are biased, and good for the researchers presenting their view that prostitution is violence against women because that’s important to know,”
Actually, if you look on page 8 of the Weitzer’s paper, you’ll note some very specific criticisms of the methodology of Farley, et al, namely 1) huge sampling bias (street prostitution and other highly marginalized prostitutes cannot be taken as representative of all prostitutes or all sex workers, as I’ve argued above), and 2) no reporting of how the questions were asked (did Farley get the results she wanted by asking leading questions? – her study does not eliminate that possibility).
“but Weitzer becomes a prick when he says ex-prostitutes conducting research can’t be trusted to meet his masculinity-defined impartiality standard where psuedo-scientific claptrap about absolute objectivity is praised so ex-prostitutes can contribute nothing of worth. No doubt Weitzer considers himself a stoic and manly 100% neutral and impartial observer.”
I’ve got to love radfems use scientific studies. Beat people over the head with their pet scientific study, then when somebody subjects said study to criticism grounded in scientific analysis, they turn around and whine about “masculinity-defined impartiality standard where psuedo-scientific claptrap about absolute objectivity is praised”. With some name-calling thrown in for good measure.
Well Curious, you’re the one waving Weitzer’s dirty thong around. Say how about telling us how many times can a scientist cite himself and still remain credible? {That was ‘cite’ himself not “shite” himself, but probably, it’s the same in this instance.}
by the way, I’m curious: how much of this research can be ultimately traced back to Coalition Against Trafficking in Women?
http://www.catwinternational.org/
because, you know, I’ve been reading fairly extensively at their site; and stuff by/about Janice Raymond, the Co-Exec Director; the organization seems quite influential. and they may well do good work, but I can’t help but note that Raymond is not exactly what you’d call mainstream in many regards.
I mean, I’m sure her virulent transphobia doesn’t necessarily need to come into play here, considering that the organization is specifically dedicated to -women and children.- For example.
but, they are very very big on the notion that there is -no- distinction to be made between trafficking and prostitution.
>“masculinity-defined impartiality standard where psuedo-scientific claptrap about absolute objectivity is praised”
–omfg, rotfl!
yes indeedy do.
shit, if that’s the case, why use studies at all? why not rely on the womens’ own stories, their own herstory–oh, wait. Right.
“In any event, if Farley really wants to study legal brothel workers”
The point of her research was not to study “legal brothel workers”, it was to meet prostitutes around the world where most of them were. That means some examples from legal brothels should be included but since the overwhelming majority of prostitutes are not legal, even in countries where prostitution is legal, it would be skewing the results for a researcher not to focus mainly on illegal prostitution.
Some American prostitutes who have been in Nevada’s legal brothels give testimony at this site. One woman said she preferred the street to being so brazenly owned and controlled by Nevada brothel pimps, a sentiment not uncommon among pro-prostitution advocates who have recently changed tactics from asking for legalization to asking for decriminalization instead because legalization has failed to benefit prostituting women.
I’m still lost on how you get from me pointing out that most tricks are average men to me saying “most North American sex workers are trafficked in from other countries.”
As for what I’m willing to ignore, it’s not the words written by the very tiny minority of women who claim to happily choose sex work. I hear when Renegade Evolution says she wants health insurance, I just don’t place that need of hers over the needs of millions of women and girls not to be serially raped for men’s fun and profit. What is women’s right to be a prostitute if there is no corresponding women’s right not to be a prostitute? Some feminists make their reason for existing asserting women’s right to sex, and I’m all for women’s right to sex, but how respected can the right to say “yes” to sex be when there is no right to say “no” to unwanted sex demanded by men?
Like R. Mildred said earlier, “And tell me: why on earth would we make laws that make the lives of people who say their life is pretty good already easier while ignoring the rampant abuse of their less well off sisters?”
She also suggests decriminalization, if you notice. Which I am down with. (Along with single-payer health insurance, and a whole shitload of other things).
>but how respected can the right to say “yes” to sex be when there is no right to say “no” to unwanted sex demanded by men?
Well, that is a question, yes.
Some of us frame it the other way around as well, though.
“tastes great/less filling.”
And I’m not convinced that yet more pilin’ on the ‘ho’s -or- even the customers makes the world a safer place for all or even most women, no.
And–Sam?
I get that you’re saying RE is not representative of most sex workers. Hell, I’m pretty certain she’d agree with that herself; she’s said as much on numerous occasions, I do believe.
What I’m less clear about is why you’re not willing to talk to her directly, out of everyone in the “room.” Nasty names, was it? curious.
btw: what exactly does “limp-wristed” mean in this context?
“What is women’s right to be a prostitute if there is no corresponding women’s right not to be a prostitute? Some feminists make their reason for existing asserting women’s right to sex, and I’m all for women’s right to sex, but how respected can the right to say “yes” to sex be when there is no right to say “no” to unwanted sex demanded by men?”
I guess I must not have been reading the papers the day when rape was legalized and prostitution made mandatory.
Sam:
“I hear when Renegade Evolution says she wants health insurance, I just don’t place that need of hers over the needs of millions of women and girls not to be serially raped for men’s fun and profit. What is women’s right to be a prostitute if there is no corresponding women’s right not to be a prostitute?”
Great. Ren also thinks it would be nice for ALL people, no matter their job, to have health insurance. Ren thinks it is her right to do what she does for living. Ren is also for everyone interested and involved doing whatever they can to assist and aid women who want out. Ren works towards this end herself, but no one seems to hear that part…they see Ren = “Minority Enabling Patriarchal Construct Whore” = not good for our argument, move along…
I eat fruit. And veggies. Is it my right to eat those foods when a great many migrant labors don’t have the right not to pick them? I also wear clothes. Is it my right to wear them when a great many sweatshop laborers do not have any option but to sew them? I assume you also eat food and wear clothing, yes? Do you own luxury tech items such as a stereo, television, computer, perhaps a mp3 player, all of which have parts manufactured by people (women, men and children) who are working in crap conditions for crap wages with no health care? These people would probably not choose to do these jobs, yet you yourself prosper from their toil and pain, yes?
Belle:
“I get that you’re saying RE is not representative of most sex workers. Hell, I’m pretty certain she’d agree with that herself; she’s said as much on numerous occasions, I do believe.”
Correct. She has. Often.
This could be a pretty good discussion if that imbecile Imacuriousblue would stop interjecting his patriarchal bullshit privelege left, right and centre.
And BD, I’m more than familiar with your “quick post/shoot ‘em dead’” approach.
Some of us, though, are a tad more considered.
90% want out.
90% is a pretty persuasave figure, non?
The lifestyle ‘choice’ of the remaining 10% condemns the 90% to a ‘lifestyle’ they want out of? How fair is that?
And who’s actually looking at the big picture and the impact for all women here?
Gods. Who’s actually even thinking of the lives of real life women here? Their life stories – as so neatly dismissed up-thread – are listened to on a daily basis by peole like me. People who try to help abused girls/women regain control of their own lives, help them regain their humanity, their sense of self worth, help them to feel like they mean something to the rest of the human race after having been negated and made nothing by the patriarchal power of quids and ‘feminist’ supporters of that power who dismiss the suffering of their existence.
Not to mention the impact that the trade in human female flesh has on all women, everywhere.
Witchy:
I for one do what I can to help those who want out to get out. Trust me, just because I like my job does not mean I think all women who do any aspect of sex work do. I will admit I am “sketchier” on how much I think ‘the pornstitution’ affects other “regular women” (please, please, resist the urge to throw studies and statistics at me), but I do know women, and have helped women, who want out. I know what my choice is, but I never said or believed my choice was right for everyone. Not by a long shot.
Just for the hell of it:
America’s 10 most dangerous jobs…
http://money.cnn.com/2003/10/13/pf/dangerousjobs/
or
http://www.forbes.com/2002/09/03/0903worksafe.html
How about in Russia?
http://www.freemedia.at/cms/ipi/freedom_detail.html?country=/KW0001/KW0003/KW0078/&year=2003
China?
http://www.chinalaborwatch.org/en/web/article.php?article_id=50344
And, of course, violence against women:
http://www.un.org/rights/dpi1772e.htm
“90% want out.
90% is a pretty persuasave figure, non?
The lifestyle ‘choice’ of the remaining 10% condemns the 90% to a ‘lifestyle’ they want out of? How fair is that?”
90% of the street prostitutes surveyed by Melissa Farley, yes. But as has been pointed out, repeatedly, the sex industry is much larger than the street prostitutes surveyed by Melissa Farley. Do 90% of escorts, strippers, and porn actresses want out now? It would be nice if somebody actually bothered to ask them before deciding their work should be banned.
So, no not a persuasive figure, considering it only applies to part of the sex industry.
Piss all over my “patriarchal privilege” all you like, at least I have something resembling an argument.
…at least I have something resembling an argument.
You don’t. The prostituted women surveyed by Farley, Baral, Kiremire and Sezgin in South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, the USA and Zambia were active on the streets and in brothels. See here.
Do 90% of escorts, strippers, and porn actresses want out now? It would be nice if somebody actually bothered to ask them before deciding their work should be banned.
This is irrelevant and absurd: if Farley, et al., had included “porn actresses” and “strippers”, they would have been accused of confusing different kinds of “sex work”. Anti-legalisation feminists are the ones talking about pornstitution; when pornographers aknowledge that they are nothing but pimps, we can talk again.
To clarify: by “anti-legalisation feminists”, I mean abolitionist feminists who support the Swedish model (criminalize the pimps and johns, depenalize the prostitutes and give them alternatives).
As for the male privilege, Iamcuriousblue, you may want to familiarize yourself with this checklist written by an non-radical pro-feminist man.
Like all men, including Ronald Weitzer and myself, you are a potential prostitute user (I am not trying to guess whether you are an actual “john” or not). As such, your eagerness to defend the status quo with no regard to the harm done to a majority of women makes you sound like you feel threatened that your “right” to masturbate inside or upon a woman’s body will be taken away.
Weitzer’s criticism doesn’t prove anything about Melissa Farley’s work, and yes, the fact that he is a man and doesn’t belong the the “default prostitute” class is quite relevant. When he publishes his own study with fantastic results showing that pornstitution, I mean “sex work”, is awesome all over the globe, you can come back to us. But I ain’t holding my breath.
“Like all men, including Ronald Weitzer and myself, you are a potential prostitute user”
wow. really? all men everywhere? Is it a constant pressure that you actively resist, or is the statement itself more of a theoretical construct? I’m not trying to be snide, but what’s that like for you? I can’t imagine that 49% of the world’s population wakes up in the morning and wonders “should I use prostitutes today?” Maybe some portion, but surely not all…?
is every woman potentially a prostitute?
“When he publishes his own study with fantastic results showing that pornstitution, I mean “sex work”, is awesome all over the globe,”
Is it possible that exchanging sexual activity for money could be neutral? neither as awesome nor as heinous as either camp would paint it? I mean, insofar as anything is potentially possible, could that be a potential possibility?
I know that there’s at least one woman who gives a quite evenhanded picture of what it’s like to be a prostitute, taking the good (as she sees it) with the bad (as she sees it).
“you can come back to us.”
I’m okay with IACB hanging out here – of course I don’t make the rules. I guess the only people who would be able to prevent IACB from coming back to “us” would be the PunkAss Moderators (one of whom you might be, Jimmy Ho – I don’t know).
:headdesk: :headdesk: :headdesk:
Jimmy? Babe? Yer also a potential prostitute, did you want to. Did you know?
I know it’s a really really wacky and bizarre notion; but -men are prostitutes, too.-
and some women are even clients, sometimes. no, really.
Anyway; the “more feminist than thou” thing is funny enough coming from women; from -men-, well…ahhh, never mind. Keep on keeping on. I’ll just be over here in the lawnchair. pass the popcorn, someone, will you?
and w-w: “considered:”
ahaha. ahahahaha. ahahahaHAHAHAHAH AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
(falls over dies ded)
–Jimmy! Hey, baby! SHOW US YER CREDS!!! w00t
America’s most dangerous job:
“To our knowledge, no population of women studied previously has had a crude mortality rate, standardized mortality ratio, or percentage of deaths due to murder even approximating those observed in our cohort. The workplace homicide rate for prostitutes (204 per 100,000) is many times higher than that for women and men in the standard occupations that had the highest workplace homicide rates in the United States during the 1980s (4 per 100,000 for female liquor store workers and 29 per 100,000 for male taxicab drivers) (29).
Our crude homicide mortality rate for presumed-active prostitutes (229 per 100,000) is also similar to the mortality rates extrapolated from passive and informal surveillance of prostitute women in Canada between 1992 and 1998 (30) (181 per 100,000 on the basis of our prostitute prevalence estimate (9) and national population figures (31)) and in the Canadian province of British Columbia between 1985 and 1990 (32) (112–225 per 100,000). Parallel calculations for the 34 known prostitute women who were murdered on the job in Canada between 1992 and 1995 (30) yield a workplace homicide rate of 127 per 100,000. In our study, murder accounted for 50 percent of the deaths among presumed-active prostitutes. Murder accounted for 29–100 percent of prostitute deaths observed in recent decades in Birmingham, United Kingdom (Hilary Kinnell, United Kingdom Network of Sex Work Projects, personal communication, 1999), Nairobi (Stephen Moses, University of Manitoba, personal communication, 2003), Vancouver (32), and London (6). However, prostitutes represented a greater share of all female murder victims in British Columbia between 1981 and 1990 (8 percent) (32) and in Canada overall between 1991 and 1995 (5 percent) (33) than in the United States between 1981 and 1990, by our estimate (3 percent).”
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/159/8/778
I’m still waiting for anybody to come up with an occupation that is comparable in danger to that of a prositute i.e. 25% chance of being subject to violence in a six month period, and a 6% possibility of being strangled (if we look at the “safer” version of prositution). As antiprincess says, the only job that comes close is housewife, another situation where an economcally dependent woman is expected to sexually service a man.
Nothing you have posted here Renegade Evolution matches the level of violence that men inflict on prostituted women.
Prostitution is not like any other job. There is no job where paying customers routinely inflict violence, rape or murder on the people who are serving them. Lumberjacks are not at risk of being killed by the people they sell their timber to, or being beaten and raped by the guy who works out their shift patterns.
No; on the other hand on the whole you’re not quite as much at risk of losing a limb as you are, say, on the kill floor of a slaughterhouse.
and of course all this begs the question as to -what causes the violence and rape and murder.-
because the implication here is that because sexual activity is on the menu, violence and rape must inevitably follow.
the possibility that this might just have to do with the fact that the occupation is y’know ILLEGAL, and thus the prostitutes have very little if anything in the way of protection. at least -theoretically- in a slaughterhouse you have safety laws. they’re not enforced much these days, of course, but well that’s another whole subject.
but, you know, I am wondering: let’s take non-erotic massage, for example. What are the rates of rape and murder and violence in that field? I mean including the situations where it’s a female masseuse and the man’s completely undressed and the door is locked.
So why’s it suddenly become so much more dangerous and degrading if it -is- an erotic massage? Because technically y’know that’s considered prostitution in many places. Even if there is no actual penetration of “wet fuckholes” involved. (unless maybe that of the lubed guy on the table).
because there is now touching of genitalia and/or the anus involved, see.
Does his penis suddenly like spring to life, leap off the table and go on the attack? I am just wondering, here.
btw, I note that the APJE article is by a group of people, all but one of whom have male monikers. That’s okay, though, right?
It’s a bit hard for me to keep all this straight, as it were; lemme see if I have this correct:
Men entering the argument to talk about statistics and/or “objective” studies: okay as long as they agree with the ones that say Prostitution Is Bad. if they don’t, they are exercising “patriarchal privilege.”
and anyway, all this “objective” talk of studies and so on is, well, male, and pale, and patriarchal. Generally it’s better to hear from the women themselves: “from the horse’s mouth, as it were.”
Women talking from their own personal experience in the field right here, on the other hand: if they’re not saying how awful it all is: not acceptable. Plus, nasty names might be thrown around.
Have I got this right?
Please don’t call me “babe”. Yes, I know that there are “call boys” and “gigolos”. I also know that when I am unemployed or have debts, I am not supposed to rent out my body to women I would never have any relation with, in order to survive. It is a lie to say that this is expected from men in the same proportion that it is expected from women. If this is really what you want to say, you will have to prove that there is a comparable number of men-for-women prostitutes. What is the proportion? When I walk in a “red light” area (legal or not), I am instantly assumed to be looking for “a girl”. If I were a young woman, I may be believed to be looking for a “job”. This is a significant difference. I am all for equality, but it has not been achieved.
“What are the rates of rape and murder and violence in that field? I mean including the situations where it’s a female masseuse and the man’s completely undressed and the door is locked.”
You tell me. I’m not arguing that massage equals prostitution, because it doesn’t.
“I am wondering: let’s take non-erotic massage, for example. What are the rates of rape and murder and violence in that field? I mean including the situations where it’s a female masseuse and the man’s completely undressed and the door is locked.
So why’s it suddenly become so much more dangerous and degrading if it -is- an erotic massage?”
Again, it’s a question you need to ask yourself or the clients of prostitutes, because many of the latter see a prosituted woman and regard it as an opportunity for violence against her.
What I don’t understand BelleDame is why, when faced with the figures of what actually is done to prostitutes – the violence inflicted on them by their customers and pimps – you still try to argue that it is just like any other job. Once again, unless the slaughterhouse men are having their limbs cut off by the guy they sell their meet to, there really isn’t any comparison.
Actually, I didn’t challenge Iamcuriousblue’s pro-feminism, because that’s not my problem. And for the record, I do know that “feminist men” can be abusive and arrogant as well.
“This is irrelevant and absurd: if Farley, et al., had included ‘porn actresses’ and ’strippers’, they would have been accused of confusing different kinds of ’sex work’.”
Well, then, you concede my point. But why is it, then, that whenever debates about porn, stripping, or escorting come up, antis inevitably trot out Farley’s statistics about street prostitutes?
“As for the male privilege, Iamcuriousblue, you may want to familiarize yourself with this checklist written by an non-radical pro-feminist man.”
I’ve seen that little shame list before and I have no intention of humbling myself before the likes you all. I am not pro-radfem and I’m not bound by radfem rules. If you like, I’m the enemy. But like all enemies, I make a good sounding board. At least I can demonstrate to you where your pet theories fall flat once you get outside your own little circle of groupthink. Learn something from that or not, its no skin off my ass.
“Like all men, including Ronald Weitzer and myself, you are a potential prostitute user (I am not trying to guess whether you are an actual ‘john’ or not). As such, your eagerness to defend the status quo with no regard to the harm done to a majority of women makes you sound like you feel threatened that your ‘right’ to masturbate inside or upon a woman’s body will be taken away.”
Well, all you’d have to do is look at my blog to know that I look at porn. I’m not going to take on some kind of feigned neutrality and pretend I don’t have interests. I will say, however, that my issue goes beyond just the freedom to look at porn or go to escorts – the real issue for me is whether any media I look, not just dirty pictures, is subject to censorship and whether another adult can consent to sex with me without interference from the State. I the kinds of laws that radfems propose significantly take those freedoms away from both men and women alike. I make zero apology for arguing for such liberties.
And believe it or not, I actually do value what women in the sex industry have to say. Even the ones that claim to have been hurt by it. That’s my reality check, personally.
But the perspective of a bunch of would-be Matriarchs whose main beef with “power” seems to be that they don’t have it to lord over others. Well, call me not feeling very guilty or ashamed for rubbing them the wrong way.
Eighty-six me from this forum if you like, but don’t think doing so will strengthen your argument in any way.
“and anyway, all this “objective” talk of studies and so on is, well, male, and pale, and patriarchal. Generally it’s better to hear from the women themselves: “from the horse’s mouth, as it were.””
If this is directed at me, I don’t think studies (i.e. what actually happened in reality) are necessarily patriarchal even if they are carried out by men. I think you are referring to my objections to KH’s assertions of who were the “authorities” on coercion – in KH’s case she was referring to male commentary and opinion on rape and coercion (not studies) which indeed was biased.
“Women talking from their own personal experience in the field right here, on the other hand: if they’re not saying how awful it all is: not acceptable. Plus, nasty names might be thrown around.”
Well with the murder study I’m not sure how you could talk to those women given that they are DEAD (you know, killed by their clients, because of the job they do) and in the study that Weitzer referenced, women did talk about their experiences and many of those experiences were of violence.
I think you are just trying to twist things round belledame, to avoid the main point that by the very nature of their job, prostitutes face huge dangers from men (as do housewives).
>Once again, unless the slaughterhouse men are having their limbs cut off by the guy they sell their meet to, there really isn’t any comparison.
Um, why is that, exactly? I mean, does it matter a lot to the guy who lost his limb and isn’t getting any restitution for it?
I am sort of getting the impression that what you’re really saying is that “it’s the thought that counts.” That can’t be what you’re saying, is it?
As for how much danger there is in non-erotic massage: generally speaking, not much. But there are rules and regulations and established protocol, there, y’see. And also it’s not considered “degrading.”
>prostitutes face huge dangers from men (as do housewives).
Oh, okay. So should het marriage be made illegal, too? groovy; I’m for it.
and no, Jimmy Ho is not a mod here.
but it sure is butch how he stakes out the territory. makes me all damp and swoony, it do.
“That little shame list” wa written by Ampersand, who most definitely doesn’t identify as a “radfem”, nor even a “pro-radfem”. Actually, he is quite often criticized by radical feminist women.
“Um, why is that, exactly? I mean, does it matter a lot to the guy who lost his limb and isn’t getting any restitution for it?
I am sort of getting the impression that what you’re really saying is that “it’s the thought that counts.” That can’t be what you’re saying, is it?”
I don’t know why you are comparing the two. Are the rates of permanent injury and death the same for slaughterhouse workers as they are for prostitutes? Please provide some figures.
Well, I dunno about figures. But here is an imagery (we all like imagery) and anecdote (we all like those, too) article about work in the modern-day slaughterhouse.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Health/MostDangerousJob_FFN.html
Enjoy.
(”-laden”)
Oh, Jimmy, you know: you’d increase the clientele pool considerably if you widened it to other men.
As for what kind of assumptions would be made when you’re walking the street–that is, that you’re “exempt” from mens’ expectation: I can think of some streets you could walk where that presupposition would be verrrrrry much challenged. try it, if you like. It might help with that solidarity experience thing you seem to be seeking.
“Well, I dunno about figures. But here is an imagery (we all like imagery) and anecdote (we all like those, too) article about work in the modern-day slaughterhouse.”
I’m not going to read about a slaughterhouse. I don’t eat meat because I know what goes on in them.
I’m still curious to know what you are basing your comparison of slaughterhouse work to prostitution on, if you don’t even know if the rates of violence and injury and death are comparable. You don’t really have a point if they aren’t.
oh, yah, and please note: that Fast Food Nation exceprt refers to women working there, too.
is that one of the options women should choose when trying to get off the mean streets? or even off the mean escort service/independent sex-based business she’s set up for herself?
Well, garsh, delphyne, I don’t “use” prostitutes either, but I still read the articles y’all have been providing. Many of which rely on rather graphic imagery, much more so than actual stats. You’re saying you can’t even read an online excerpt? The guy’s making a claim that slaughterhouse work is “the most dangerous job.” I’m not gonna make it for him, but: that’s what he’s doing. See for yourself.
as per why no stats:
“Although official statistics are not kept, the death rate among slaughterhouse sanitation crews is extraordinarily high. They are the ultimate in disposable workers: illegal, illiterate, impoverished, untrained. The nation’s worst job can end in just about the worst way. Sometimes these workers are literally ground up and reduced to nothing…”
By the way, fair admission:
I went to Burger King earlier this week.
I also look at indie women-made pr0n from time to time.
Tell me. In the interest of not exploiting my brothers and sisters further, which should I work on giving up first?
I’m saying that I’ve read the research already belledame, you aren’t providing me with any new information. I’m not an apologist for what goes on in slaughterhouses, the way you are an apologist for what happens to prostitutes. I don’t eat meat because of what is done to both the animals and to the workers in those situations (although workers in the UK don’t face the same conditions as those in the US).
I’m asking why you are comparing the two jobs here. I think although slaughterhouse work is a horrific job, it is still not comparable to prostitution.
And if you aren’t making the claim that it isn’t the nation’s worst job then why on earth are you bringing it up here? Once again I am struggling to see your point.
“In the interest of not exploiting my brothers and sisters further, which should I work on giving up first?”
alternately, if forced with a choice between peddling my (ample) ass to pay the rent or surrounding myself with dismembered bleeding animal corpses, which is the better/less dangerous/more humane choice?
I am not making the claim, delphyne, because I am not the one who did the research. The -author- is; I am at least open to the possibility that his claim is correct.
And yeah, you know, wading through pools of blood, the more minor wounds, the -everyday experience- of your average slaughterhouse worker–as opposed to the unfortunate ones who lose limbs and so forth–this, to me, reads way the hell more horrific than your -average- sex work job.
clearly your mileage varies.
oh, and the other thing is: the -reason- the conditions are so much worse here/now is because -there isn’t any regulation (effectively).-
Unless slaughterhouse workers face the same level of permanent injury, illness, PTSD, violence and death as prostitutes then you *don’t* have a point. I mean I’m also open to the possiblity that you do have a point but we’ll never know unless you provide at least a few figures.
Huh. Anecdotes of peoples’ suffering and personal experience are irrelevant unless I can back it up with statistics? Quantity matters more than quality? Why that’s so, so, so….butch.
O.K., I’ll go on the lookout, then. Might be a while.
Jimmy:
“This is irrelevant and absurd: if Farley, et al., had included ‘porn actresses’ and ’strippers’, they would have been accused of confusing different kinds of ’sex work’.”
Very true. However, perhaps then when discussing street prostitutes or those in certain brothels, one should say, “I am referring here alone to street prostitutes and those in certain brothels” rather than saying “the pornstitution”. Clarification is good. I have zero personal experience with street prostitution, pimps, brothels, or any of that and I know it is a violent, probably very unpleasant life. However, it does not comprise the whole of sex work.
Delphyne:
Yes, being a prostitute is different than being a lumberjack. I did also include a link that details a great many acts of violence that occur against women –including prostitutes- but after reading all of the links I posted, I’m in no rush to be a reporter in Russia or a coal miner in China, how about you? And I also previously stated that I am fully aware of the potential violence in ANY aspect of sex work, as it is something I personally have to think about every time I go to work. There is a reason I have spent time learning how to do a snap kick in seven-inch heels after all…oh yeah, and why I own a gun.
Belle:
Any violence or danger to anyone else in the world is secondary because those people are not screwing for a living, remember? Being a constructed piece of masturbatory fuckmeat for the pleasure of the patriarchy makes all the difference in the world…
It is curious to me, though: delphyne, you’ve clearly found your Cause, and that’s cool. go over to the Peter Singer boards or the PETA people; they’ll presumably have another take on What’s Most Important.
or, for that matter, the anti-abortion folks.
we’ve all got our Cause.
…or the War On Street Drugs people, or…
one could start here:
http://www.goveg.com/workerRights_dangerous.asp?pf=true
“According to statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor, nearly one in three slaughterhouse workers suffers from illness or injury, compared to one in 10 workers in other manufacturing jobs.”
>Unless slaughterhouse workers face the same level of permanent injury, illness, PTSD, violence and death as prostitutes…
…slip! oh, thanks, antip.
Say, as long as you’re there: any stats on the relative levels of permanent injury, PTSD, violence and death as say professional soldiers?…
You’ve cleary found your Cause too, belledame. Congratulations to you and to me.
You appear to be insinuating that because I find one thing important, I don’t think other issues are important. Animal rights are important too, I just choose to put my energies towards women’s rights. Each of us does what we can in our own way, surely you don’t object to that.
Not in the slightest.
Out of curiousity, though, how do you feel about the pro-life activists?
delphyne:
‘Each of us does what we can in our own way, surely you don’t object to that.’
i would hope not. that each of us includes me as well, or does the mere fact that I sell sexuality and sex for a living cancel that out?
If you are working to further the cause of women Renegade Evolution why would I object to it?
I don’t think selling sex and sexuality furthers the cause of women however.
“If you are working to further the cause of women Renegade Evolution why would I object to it?
I don’t think selling sex and sexuality furthers the cause of women however.”
non-snarky comment:
How do you weigh that though — I mean, what kind of feminist calculus do you do on a person’s life, to determine how useful to the cause an individual is?
RenEv helps three of her female stripper colleagues find jobs in other fields. But she keeps on keepin’ on every friday and saturday night to make her living. Good for feminism? bad for feminism? a wash?
“I mean, what kind of feminist calculus do you do on a person’s life, to determine how useful to the cause an individual is?”
I don’t. We’ve had this TEDIOUS discussion before antiprincess where you complain that because a radical feminsit says that something is anti-feminist or anti-woman they are somehow making a judgement on a person’s life or their character. I don’t see people in terms of utiltity. Renegade Evolution can do what she likes, she just can’t expect me or other anti-prostitution feminist to agree that prostitution furthers the cause of women. Helping women in sex work get out of sex work does help the cause of women. This isn’t arithmetic, this is politics. Why on earth are you confusing the two?
delphyne;
I gathered that. However, I do think a woman making her own choices does, and the paycheck allows me to help other women more than being a professional student, working in an office, or another job might. I also think the more emotionally/mentally pulled together, non-coerced women who are in the ‘field of sex work’, the more who end up running the strip clubs and agencies and in power positions within the porn industry or owning the brothels…well, perhaps that will begin to change the sex industry over all. “Sex Work” itself is not going anywhere, not as long as people are willing to buy sex and sexuality and as long as people are willing to sell it. That I do firmly believe. So, I think changing the whole damn realm from within might be a better tactic. The women I know who run clubs and agencies tend to treat their employees quite well, they do not cheat them out of money, see that they are looked after, treat them like humans, give them time off when needed, because most of them have “been there” themselves. I think such things could make a big difference.
any stats on the relative levels of permanent injury, PTSD, violence and death as say professional soldiers?…
The “which industry is more dangerous” contest, while interesting, is some what beside the actual point here; that something is dangerous or risky does not make it bad – what makes such a thing bad is that it is A) very risky, (where high risk of death/rape/serious injury = very risky), B) exploitative/dehumanising/etc… C) those who are employed in the profession are unaware of the full risks going into the industry (the main reason for attacking claims that prostitution is “empowering” or “feminist” is because it’s blatant false advertising – ontop of normalising men using other people’s bodies as masturbatory aids) so that they can make an informed choice to join the industry and finally D) are unable to freely leave the industry if they don’t like it, and/or aren’t as able to handle the risks as they first thought (another level on which the army goes into the “bad” column more often than not, though I’m sure they don’t shoot deserters anymore).
This if of course without bringing in point E) whether people are freely choosing to enter into the profession in question in the first place (another place the army falters on, that it’s called a volunteer army when most people join up because there is nothing else to do to earn money where they’re from is ridiculous imho)
Prostitution, as it stands, and as the “pros” (sorry, we need better labels dammit) talk about, falls flat on points A, through D, I’ve set out how prostitution, even the ones who choose to enter into the profession and are reasonbly high paid are exploited pretty much as an inherent part of the very concept of sex for money, it’s been set out that it’s dangerous, lack of foreknowledge about what the industry is going to be like will vary from hooker to hooker, but as this debate always produces people who say that it’s all puppies and kittens and down play the inevitability of rape in the profession, that most prostitutes have no idea what they’re really getting themselves in for when they start selling themselves is not entirely ludicrous I hope, and the economic factors that make it dehumanising and exploitative will also help to mean that it’s not that easy to exit the industry at will.
As I remember from that last TEDIOUS discussion, delphyne, antip also “got told” (again) that BDSM was axiomatically Bad For Women; and that perhaps she and others of us who disagreed with you in general should just “get out of your way.”
…I just think: garsh, what with all of this being so self-evident and clear-cut, those of us who find this strange “grey area” thing must be, well, I don’t know what’s wrong with us.
we do need better labels.
“not-neccessarily-anti-depending-on-context” is a bit…something.
“abolition-skeptical,” perhaps.
jeez, Delphyne – I’m hurt. discussing important topics with you never gets old, for me.
>“This is irrelevant and absurd: if Farley, et al., had included ‘porn actresses’ and ’strippers’, they would have been accused of confusing different kinds of ’sex work’.”
Very true. However, perhaps then when discussing street prostitutes or those in certain brothels, one should say, “I am referring here alone to street prostitutes and those in certain brothels” rather than saying “the pornstitution”. Clarification is good.>
she’s right you know
I’m sorry I said tedious, AP. I’m tired of this conversation however. Thinking a behaviour is sexist or anti-woman isn’t a value judgement on a person it’s a value judgement on their behaviour. It’s perfectly possible to be a feminist and do unfeminist things (most of us are in that very situation). I’m finding it difficult to understand why you have such a hard time in grasping that.
No, delphyne: you are the one who is having a conceptual problem. It isn’t a question of antip or others of us being upset because we think you’re saying we’re not measuring up to your standards of what is feminist; it’s that we -don’t agree with your standards in the first place.”
I am reminded here of certain peoples’ methods of evangelization:
“That’s fine if you don’t believe in God. But -He believes in you.- Now: I’m just gonna run through this list of the Ten Commandments; let’s see how many youv’e broken. Oh, my point is not to put myself above you; the point is, -I am a sinner also. We’re all sinners.- The important thing is the struggle. And, to repent.”
No you’re wrong belledame, those commandments are based on faith. Feminism is based on facts, women’s experience and analysis of the same. And like I said I don’t reallly have any judgement on people here further than some of their actions may be anti-woman. I’m not interested in calling anybody sinners. However you are very keen to liken radical feminsits to -
homophobes
right-wingers
anti-choicers
religious evangelists
If anybody is making judgements of people here it’s you.
“it’s that we -don’t agree with your standards in the first place”
I know you don’t, and I and others don’t’ agree with your standards about what is feminist either. Which is why we are having a discussion.
“it’s that we -don’t agree with your standards in the first place”
I know you don’t, and I and others don’t’ agree with your standards about what is feminist either. Which is why we are having a discussion.
>No you’re wrong belledame, those commandments are based on faith. Feminism is based on facts, women’s experience and analysis of the same.
Ahhh.
But which women’s experience? Whose analysis? Are you -sure- there’s not “faith” involved here? Oh, sure, there’s no *supernatural* faith here, that goes without saying.
But, y’know, the whole notion of the Patriarchy, capital P, certain assumptions about the nature of Man (and Woman)…those, you know, are not exactly conclusions that were arrived at via hard sociology. It’s a framework. Take it or leave it; but understand that once you reify it into something that IS real, it REALLY is, then it becomes an article of…faith.
>I know you don’t, and I and others don’t’ agree with your standards about what is feminist either.
But you see, I don’t “got told” people that their actions/beliefs are ipso facto anti-feminist, adn why are they having such a hard time grasping this? sheesh.
>And like I said I don’t reallly have any judgement on people here further than some of their actions may be anti-woman. I’m not interested in calling anybody sinners.
“Love the anti-feminist, not the anti-feminism.” Got it.
by the way, you know, these days quite a few fundamentalist Christians, and at least one fundamentalist Moslem that I know of, insist that they, too, are relying on EVIDENCE, SOLID EVIDENCE. (for the truth of Intelligent Design, for the wrongness and destructiveness that is homosexual activity, for the age of the Earth…) with studies and stats and graphs and everything. it all sounds very scientific and reliable and reasonable: who could argue with statistics? Not those of us who don’t know what the fuck we’re talking about when it comes to such shit, that’s for sure. So, you nod and try to look thoughtful and make vague remarks about “fair and balanced” or whatnot.
of course once people who have a better grasp of such things come into the argument then all the “we are reasonable, rational creatures and it has NOTHING TO DO WITH FAITH” business all starts to unravel rather splendidly; but then of course come all the reasons why the detractors Must Not BE Listened To, Because They (unlike anyone else here) Have An Agenda.
and, delphyne: I b’lieve you, too, may be conflating several discussions when you say that I
>liken radical feminsits to -
homophobes
right-wingers
anti-choicers
religious evangelists>
As per judgment: note that I actually haven’t even necessarily passed judgment on any or all of these groups, either. I’m pro-choice, for instance, but I do actually believe there’s such a thing as a reasoned position against abortion. I don’t agree; but I don’t automatically dismiss the speakers as awful, unreasonable people either. Myself.
As per the homophobe business:
If you are referring to the business with transphobic radical feminist individuals, as per the one in which both you and I are both in ongoing discussions with: hell yes I compare that to homophobia. You have a problem with this?
Oh, FFS here I go getting frustrated again. If you are going to compare studies of violence and murder in prostitution and women in prostitution’s own experience of the degradation and violence inherent withing it to fruitloops coming up with unscientific “proof” of intelligent design then there’s nothing I can say to you.
““Love the anti-feminist, not the anti-feminism.” Got it.”
No you haven’t got it. I don’t love anti-feminists. Where do you get that idea?
“But, y’know, the whole notion of the Patriarchy, capital P, certain assumptions about the nature of Man (and Woman)…those, you know, are not exactly conclusions that were arrived at via hard sociology.”
Really? What, apart from the fact that in the world we live in men hold the majority of economic, social and political power? You really haven’t been paying attention if you haven’t noticed that.
Yes, delphyne, I have noticed that; but that’s not all that’s meant by the radical feminist use of “patriarchy,” generally speaking. The key assumption here that’s not being agreed on is WHY that might be so. the notion that it all boils down to male sexual domination of women via rape–>prostitution–>porn; hence the necessity to focus urgently on these things (and conflate them all). THAT’S what we don’t agree on.
And when you claim that so-and-so is ipso-facto “anti-feminist” or “anti-woman” you are implicitly declaring that we all accept the same standards of definition.
and fruitloop is as fruitloop does. there are those that consider Janice Raymond a bit of a fruitloop. More than a bit, in fact.
(or Jeffreys; or–yes, I know, cringe–even Dworkin. yes).
>I don’t love anti-feminists. Where do you get that idea?
Well, it just sort of radiates out from you, you know. Among others. The Luv. The compassionate all-abiding concern.
I mean, the love of the “anti-feminist” -women,- that is. Abstractly, as it were.
I’m out of here. Your sarcasm and sneering is just getting too much, belledame.
Maybe everybody else will get the discussion back on track. Whether I “love” anti-feminists or not has fuck all to do with the violence men mete out to women in prostitution or whether prostitution is inherently exploitative.
Oh, dear. I do tend toward sarcasm and sneering, I know. Well, hopefully at least it wasn’t too TEDIOUS for you. mwah, mazel tov, tell your ma thanks for the chicken soup.
Never believe what R Mildred says. That’s the lesson I draw from (belatedly) reading her post. I should have guessed that, rather than make her comments where I was, she’d take them somewhere I wasn’t, the better to do what she does without fear of contradiction. It’s a fool’s errand to respond to some people, but I’ll give it one try. Whether intentionally or for other reasons, Mildred gross misstates what I said, repeatedly, at length, & slowly enough for a child to understand. While she at least improves on Delphyne, who insisted to the bitter last that I’d never said what I meant (although she violently disagreed with it), she still gets it very, very wrong. I do not say ‘that prostitution is not coercive.’ I say something very different &, in the real world, hardly uncontroversial: that, like most things, it sometimes is & sometimes isn’t coerced.
When a person can be said to act at all, & isn’t simply acted upon (e.g., physically constrained), she chooses. When are her choices free, consensual, unfree, coerced? At Pandagon I described 2 relevant distinctions. First, whether she chooses in response to a threat, an offer, or neither. Second, whether she chooses from among a morally acceptable range of eligible alternatives, or merely the best of an unacceptably straitened lot. (Where the criterion of minimal acceptability should be set is contested; the right generally wants it low, the left high.) Taken together, these distinctions give us 6 possibilities. Any act of choosing falls into one of the 6 cases (abstracting from complex combinations of threats & offers.) Descriptions of choices as free or unfree, consensual or coerced, refer to these conditions. Whether a choice is free or unfree, consensual or coerced, depends on the alternatives available to the agent, not the nature of the chosen alternative.
[Not all constraints on choice are imposed by another person, & some writers reserve the term ‘coercion’ for cases where there’s a human coercer. In a Robinson Crusoe (isolate) economy, for ex., the solitary agent has to do things she doesn’t want to do, just in order to live. (She may have no decent option, & die on the island.) No other agent coerces her, but she can be said to be forced to choose as she does, if she wants to live. It’s an important distinction, but nothing I’ve said relies on the restricted sense of ‘coercion.’]
No human is omnipotent; even the richest & most powerful of us are constrained in some ways. Everyone has to do things she doesn’t want to do. So is no choice free? Maybe in one sense, but in normal English usage we make morally & practically significant distinctions.
In one sense, a prostitute has sex with someone she doesn’t want to have sex with. In the same way, a charter accountant balances books he doesn’t want to balance; maybe he really wants to be a lion tamer. Even George Bush can’t completely escape doing things he doesn’t want to do. But the relevant mood is the subjunctive: it’s not so much that they don’t want to do the things they do, as that they otherwise wouldn’t have wanted to do them, but for some condition that, when fulfilled, leads them to choose to do it. As many people have said, all paid labor inherently involves things the worker doesn’t want to do, in the sense that they wouldn’t have done them but for the money. And it’s not only paid labor. In exactly the same sense, I don’t want to give my money to the grocer, in the sense that I wouldn’t want to give it to him but for the fact that he gives me food in return. In the same sense that tricks inherently are rapists, hookers inherently are robbers, as are grocers. All the parties to every single voluntary exchange, of which there are tens of billions every day, give up something they don’t want to give up, in this same narrow sense, in order to get what the other party offers. In the same sense that all tricks inherently are rapists, every party to all these exchanges is simultaneously a victim & a thief.
All very interesting, no doubt, but life would be impossible without further distinctions. I don’t want to give all my money to the woman with a gun to my head. Maybe I’d intended to buy a car with it. But I don’t really want to give the money to the dealer; I’d prefer he gave me the car free. Is the mugger no different from the car dealer? Is neither transaction consensual? One way to tell the difference is that the mugger threatens me while the dealer, like the grocer, makes me an offer. A threat , if carried out, makes me worse off than I would have been in the threatener’s absence, artificially narrows my set of eligible alternatives. An offer, whether accepted or rejected, doesn’t. I’d be no better off if no offer had been made. The threat coerces, the offer doesn’t.
The second distinction concerns the foregone alternatives. In the isolate economy, where no other person makes threats or offers, there are things the castaway chooses to do because her only alternative is death. In that sense, she’s forced to choose those things, even though there’s no evil doer forcing her. Similarly, if I decide not to give the mugger my money (there was a Jack Benny joke about this), she’s artificially narrowed my available alternatives down to one: death. (Sometimes threats are trivial, don’t narrow my range of alternatives enough to matter to me, & fail.) Conversely, if I’m already in dire straits, there’s a sense in which I can be forced to accept an offer. If the grocer merely makes an offer, she doesn’t artificially narrow my alternatives. Her existence & her offer can only make be better off than otherwise I would have been. But if I would have died if she hadn’t appeared, then there’s a sense in which I’m forced to choose to accept her offer. Likewise, if Mildred is on fire & I refuse to piss on her unless she gives me something she has that I value (to take a really fictional case), I don’t threaten her, since if I hadn’t come along she’d still be a flaming.. Still, her alternatives are so straitened that she can’t really freely choose.
The problematic cases involve this last situation. Do all prostitutes face unacceptably constrained alternatives? Not inherently. It’s the acceptability or otherwise of the foregone alternatives, not the nature of the chosen one, that determines whether it was freely chosen. It’s not the nature of the work – whether it involves sex, carpet laying, drug dealing, firefighting, whatever – that makes is coercive, it’s whether I’ve got any decent alternative to it. Each hooker is as coerced to do her job as the many people who didn’t choose it, but who, faced with comparable alternatives, chose some other job.
More later.
she chooses.
Ah, but is a woman choosing to act only according to one of the few limited choices presented to her by an oppressive system really a free choice?
Way too much of the core philosophy I’ve gotten from taoism and jeet kun do tells me that the only right choice, when you exist in a fucked up situation that inherently limits your choices in an attempt to control you, is the one that involves you ticking the “none of the above” box and telling the system itself to go fuck off by not acting according to how it expects you too – but if you cannot step outside the system and live, well survival beats all, just don’t paint doing what you need to to get by as some great victory for personal freedom, women saying “hey I’m femme and submissive!” doesn’t impress me, and women saying “I sell my body for the use of men!” doesn’t impress me, women are supposed to be/act like that, society is trying it’s hardest to make women who do not do stuff like that do that, and while I hate to be the white girl who references chris rock (because it’s a horrible cliche), it’s true that you don’t deserve praise for doing what’s expected of you, especially when that is what society is in fact pressuring you to do, you entered into a economic collaboration with the patriarchy whereby men get to use your body and in return you get to eat – what do you want? A cookie?
We’re glad you survived, we’re just not happy that you had to do what you did to survive.
And then we blame the patriarchy.
>Ah, but is a woman choosing to act only according to one of the few limited choices presented to her by an oppressive system really a free choice?>
But if the System is really so all-pervasive, then I’m not seeing where the “step outside the box” really comes in here. You’re supposed to please men and be sexxy, true; you’re also supposed to -not- be an out-and-out prostitute; you’re supposed to be a “good girl.”
I mean, I doubt the “we are whores, hear us roar” business would be happening at all were it not for the consistent (it seems from here) singling out of them as being -more collusive with the Patriarchy than…well, that’s a question, isn’t it.
There are certain social (not to say legal) benefits that come along with simply -not- being a capital W-Whore; yes there are.
and that too is Patriarchy; or, what you will.
Mildred,
Again not a single solitary substantive criticism of a single thing I say. It’s always that way, isn’t it, not of a single solitary sentence, not even the obvious things any minimally clever bully would think to say. Certainly no hint of apology for your childishly dishonest description of what I’d said earlier. Instead, more empty nasty attitudinizing, more condescension & fake pity for this imagined enemy, these privileged, pathetic women. How nice.
To answer your question, if you, in your life with your gimcrack ‘core philosophy’, have managed to transcend the ‘inherent limits’ imposed by the system, they aren’t limits. If you have the wisdom & capacity to choose something, others also can freely choose it. If other women don’t follow your sublime path, have the humility to accept it may not be because you’re so much more capable, but because they find your life as unappealing as you find theirs.
‘… what do you want? A cookie?’
From you? Nothing but this: stop your vile misogynistic invective, stop your stale dishonest fake-feminist rhetoric that only justifies the oppression of women, stop lying about what people say in their own defense. (If by saying ‘lying’ I wrongly assume you can even tell the difference, all apologies.) Other than that, from you I want nothing.
Maybe it’s really as simple as you think: that ‘the system’ demands that women be hookers, that society is trying its hardest to make all women hookers, that you & the few (150m) brave souls who manage to resist really are heroic Rebels Who Will Never Be Any Good. Maybe the patriarchy really does weep bitter tears, feels the foundations of its world begin to crumble, because you aren’t available for its base physical pleasure. If you need to feel like a nonconformist, feel free.
Maybe you think you acquit yourself well by affecting to tell hookers how really genuinely sorry you are that they – unlike you with your large spirit & your restless mind & your romantic life of Great Refusal – that they haplessly have to choose what crumbs they may just in order to survive, that they’re so wretchedly incapable of attaining your enlightened path, ‘the only right choice,’ as you see it. But again, you don’t see. No one needs your revolting condescension. There are many, many women who don’t have to do what they do. They’re at least as capable as you, for God’s sake, of taking care of themselves. They don’t require ideological correction, they make their choices perfectly capably, in the world as it is, not to impress you (!) or satisfy your parochial sexual dogma, but to take power that matters: power to better pay bills, to better educate themselves, to better feed their children. To condescend to, to affect pity, to mock any woman’s way of making a living, carries a nasty presumption that you’re anyone’s superior. You aren’t.
We’re glad you survived, we’re just not happy that you had to do what you did to survive.
yeah, I can tell you’re overjoyed. you’d think someone so happy would make free with the cookies, or at least not begrudge the presence of all us whores and freaks and gender traitors and other misc. running dogs of the patriarchy.
I can’t speak for others, but I can say that some things I did for survival purposes left me feeling ashamed and dirty and sad, while some others left me feeling proud and strong and happy, while some others left me just sort of neutral. I think that’s just the human condition. But it’s not for you to say how another person should feel about her experiences.
I don’t think anyone’s looking for a “cookie”, unless by “cookie” you mean “respect and basic human dignity”.
Not for nothin’, but if you’re giving out cookies to people you approve of, I’d rather starve.
And here, as they say, is the straw that broke the camels back…
“when you exist in a fucked up situation that inherently limits your choices in an attempt to control you, is the one that involves you ticking the “none of the above” box and telling the system itself to go fuck off by not acting according to how it expects you too – but if you cannot step outside the system and live, well survival beats all, just don’t paint doing what you need to to get by as some great victory for personal freedom, women saying “hey I’m femme and submissive!” doesn’t impress me, and women saying “I sell my body for the use of men!” doesn’t impress me, women are supposed to be/act like that, society is trying it’s hardest to make women who do not do stuff like that do that…”
- R. Mildred.
Nah, no stats or shit this go ‘round…merely some rage and reality…
Let’s see…middle class white girl, college educated, accepted to law school…has worked in restaurants, been a bar-tender, done time as a cubicle office drone, worked at an AIDS prevention/education non-profit, did an editing gig…long list of careers I COULD have stayed at, yet CHOOSES to take off her clothes to techno music and have sex in front of a photographer for a living…
And doing something ILLEGAL is, by definition, stepping outside the system, throwing off the norm, which is why it comes with the threat of potential jail time and fines.
As for expectation…most people expect their children, even the female ones, will grow up to work in a normal job and lead a normal life. All of their friends and relatives and neighbors do too. So do their teachers, pastors, rabbis (whatever). I can tell you this, you go to your 10 year high school reunion and hang out with everyone who has become teachers, parents, lawyers, real estate agents, bankers, coaches, homemakers, graphic designers, IT directors, cops, WHATEVER and say “Oh, cool, I’m a stripper or porn performer or escort” and you can just SEE how accepted and expected it is! The level of acceptance and expectation is just written all over their faces and plainly evident in the whispered comments made behind your back and on occasion, to your face. You can “feel the love” in every set of eyes glaring at you for the rest of the night.
Women who sell their bodies in any manner do it for the paycheck. Just like most working people. If they happen to like the work, well, then they are luckier than most. And women who think they know shit about how accepted and expected any of this is when they have probably never done any sort of sex work for a living certainly don’t impress me. There is a reason most sex workers don’t tell their families what they do and work under aliases, and it certainly isn’t because they are expected to do it.
Awww, shucks! Go on, now! You’re making me blush. As my grandfather used to say… “Well ain’t that white of ya!”
anyway, who’s “we?”
you know what I keep getting? This sense that there isn’t enough to go around. Empathy, civil rights, solidarity, goodwill, whatever. I mean, RM, I’m sure it was one of your multi-irony-strata’d deals–I can’t keep track of all your positions–when you said your piece about not seeing why well-heeled sex workers should get legal rights and/or sympathy before whatever other marginalized groups–including homosexuals, right? (thanks, really). but sarcasm or not, I really get the impression that you meant it, also.
“What do you want, a cookie?”
Well, what KH and others said. i.e. if not actual “approval” (that language is familiar to me, too), at least just letting it the hell go already. Is it really that damn difficult to spare, that level of tolerance? Do you run out if you give away too much of it? Seriously, you’re already pro-decriminalization; what does it cost you to just say, “gee, you’re right, we’re all in this together”? and leave off the slings and insults? Are you sure this is really about what you think it’s about?
humm, yeah, that’s what I thought.
Well, what KH and others said. i.e. if not actual “approval” (that language is familiar to me, too), at least just letting it the hell go already.
Except if you’d remember waaaay back at the very start, 10,000 years ago, we had KH saying that prostitution was feminist and empowering and half a dozen other buzz words I see anti-fems trot out time and time again when what htey’re talking about is nothing of the kind, is in fact a way to further depower and control women and their sexuality, and I’m sick of perfectly good words like that being killed through misuse – prostitution isn’t empowering, it isn’t feminist, anything that involves pleasuring johns cannot be feminist, anything that exists as a byproduct of the patriarchal assumption that men have an unalienable right to masturbate inside another human being, cannot be feminist.
So seeing as the basic premise of way too many pro-legalisation types is inherently flawed, is wrong on so many levels, what is the purpose of using such terms? Let’s first of all discount people like that Girls Gone Wild guy, who use various feminist terms to legitimize their skeeviness wihtout actually giving a flying fuck whether what htey’re saying is true or – the point is to confuse the issue so that no one challenges them.
So that leaves two other reason, one is that the person using hte terms gains from prostitution being accepted as empowering and feminst, and will in fact be able ot effectively highjack feminists to fight their battles for them – which is bad because hte patriarhcy is there remember – while ignoring the ones who get screwed over by full legalisation because suddenly prostitution is all about the magical empowering feminist vagina puppies, and all that bad stuff that goes on, well that will be illegal because rape and abuse laws are so strict these days right?
The final reason is that they really belive wha thye’re saying, that they are only able to do what yhey do because of this thin tissue of lies they weave, and that sort of willful self deception shouldn’t be allowed ot go unchallenged, there’s a real reason they sell their bodies, KH sort of brushed past in the Walmart worker comparison – you won’t get a someone who wrks in walmart telling you how wonderful and empowering and how rainbows fly out of their asses now thath they work in walmart, wokrign in walmart isn’t even a particularly good palce work in ethically – very few places are – but here’s the thing, if someone who works in walmart told me they were content/happy/able to stand working there, that they could in fact get work elsewhere but chose ot work there becuase they like it for actual reason X; which isn’t “empowerment” or any similar term, because the work ain’t.
And if they looked me in the eye and said the actual reason, whether it was the money or just because htey enjoy something about the work itself or the fact that they’ve done worse jobs and are content with what htey have – what could I say really? They haven’t tarted it up, covered it in a pile of bullshit five miles high so that I’ll accepet it, it’s not my place ot accept them, and if they simply put forth that they are themselves, and they do this act because that is what works for them for these reasons, well waht can I say? I can point out my reason for not fighting for legalisation, I can point out that it’s not feminist (but it’s not like the entire movement will be collapsed by one woman selling her body).
And when they stnad there and shrug, because they are they, whether I like it or not, well then I can hug them cuz they’re empowered, not because they sell their body ot sleazy guys who cna’t be bothered to use their hands, but because they are honest with themselves and don’t lie to other people and make them complicit in their self deception.
A sad little tale of the realities of legalised prostitution: scroll down as a john recants his visits:
http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/mens/X0001__Legal_Prostitution_.html
1. self-confessed fat and unnatractive man visits Nevada legal brothel
2. searches in vain for beautiful hot women
3. sadly, there aren’t any and OH NO what’s that? mommy bellies? (what to do what to do)
4. long tale of compromise and complaint about cold hearted ho’s
5 brothel management makes testy post in response to The Dairy of a John
5. suddenly we’re back in Kansas and fat assed jack remembers Hot Hot Honey, his fav, blonde, tall lithe well-muscled huge tits, rocks him off 5 times in 45 minutes every time remembers all the boring details of his fat assed life from a year ago, and is available at the brothel for anyone reading just call ahead.
have a great weekend RM
Oh, please…cut the bullshit, RM.
Let’s just break through the crap and get radical (as in, to the root of the issue).
If someone disagrees with your belief that “pornstitution” is innately “patriarchial” and wrong because it constitutes “male use of women as masturbatory objects” and “women selling their bodies to men”, then they are immediately deemed to be either fools or liars or “self’deceivers” who are so caught up in their orgasms or the money that they can’t see how they are being decieved by “the patriarchy” to believe that they aren’t being used.
On the other hand, if someone agrees with you, then they are immediately praised as a feminist revolutionary in full resistance to “the patriarchy”….even when they restate the same old tired conservative reactionary sexual mores about women needing to “save themselves” from the evil male gaze and the threat of their own sexual urges and feelings.
And as for comparing sex workers to Wal-Mart associates/employees: I’ll have you know that I know several dear friends who work for that company; they will say that while Wally World does have its issues (not that different from most other large world-wide retailers, other than the economies of scale), they will say that for the most part, it is a tolerable place to work; and that most people will shop there because of their cheap prices. But of course, comparing the world’s largest retailer who has the global marketing power to impose their conditions on whole nations to a sex worker who only gets to pick and choose her clients, is the height of lunacy to most thinking people.
BTW….your description of criticism of radfem ideology as favoring “men’s unalienable right to masturbate inside another human being” not only does exactly what you accuse “pro-pornstitution” advocates of doing (that is, reducing the woman to an unthinking, unfeeling object), but it is also just plain loony. You see, RM, a real woman is not quite the reduction to a blow-up doll that you take her to be; she has nerve endings, feelings, and emotions. There is a reason why a woman just might allow a man’s penis (or a dildo, or a vibrator, or her fingers, or whatever object may subsitute) inside her vagina: IT FUCKING FEELS GOOD. To tell women that seeking consensual pleasure is to be condemned merely because it violates certain “feminist” principles is not only unconsciously dense and unfeeling; it is fundamentally fascist and…dare I say it…antifeminist. Oh…and what would you say about a man going down on a woman with his toungue and fingers; would that be considered by you to be “using the woman as a sex object”??? I mean, we are talking about a real living woman’s vagina, not a Fleshlight.
Last time I checked, most men who have consensual sex with women — whether they pay for it or not — do happen to have at least a fleeting concern with the woman’s feelings….as in, whether the woman actually gets as much pleasure from the encounter as they (the guys) get. In the real world, that would be applauded as sensitivity and empathy for women; only in the alternaverse of radfem ideology would that be condemned as “patriarchial” control of women by men.
Finally…I don’t remember KM or anybody on the “pro-pornstitution” side ever saying that prostitution was in any way innately “liberating” or “empowering” to everyone. Well, guess what, RM…I will come out right here right now and say it outright. (And I speak only for myself here, not for anyone else; so let’s get that disclaimer out of the way.) I happen to think that for some people and in some situations, prostitiution and porn CAN INDEED be liberating AND empowering; both in the sense of economic freedom and sexual liberation. Anything that challenges the prevailing right-wing sexual restrictive and repressive social code, and which allows even a tiny bit of freedom from economic ruin, can’t be really that half bad…and if if that makes me in your eyes a tool of the “patriarchy”, well, tough cookies to ‘ya.
Not all porn and sex work is so positive, of course; that’s why I as a socialist and a sex radical work to change the means and ends of production to allow ALL workers (sex workers included) more control over their professions and the fruits of their labors and services.
I can’t change how you feel about us, RM, and won’t even attempt to do so; you have your right to your opinion. But please, don’t patronize me with your horseshit about how I and others who want to make sex work and the erotic/pornographic media more humane, legitimate, and user and worker friendly are merely “lying” and “self-deceiving” ourselves because our stories don’t mesh perfectly with your saw stories and morality plays. All that does is to make you look more and more like a crank antisex bigot in feminist drag who uses words like “patriarchy” and “feminism” as cluster bombs against people whose personal sexual decisions and personas you just can’t accept or respect.
If we’re the ones covered in bullshit, RM, it’s because you’re the one throwing most of it at us.
That’s my opinion….take it, leave it, or just kiss it.
Anthony
>Except if you’d remember waaaay back at the very start, 10,000 years ago, we had KH saying that prostitution was feminist and empowering and half a dozen other buzz words
I don’t, actually, sorry; at least I don’t remember her (or anyone) saying it was -categorically- empowering, feminist, yadda. Exact quote, please?
..what I do remember is you calling her a “bloated parasite.” And wondering whether you use that sort of terminology for Walmart workers; or cube workers for giant fuckoff corporations, advertising, say (frankly I think in that instance it’d be at least as apt, if not particularly useful); or, well.
Also I think you might want to tread carefully before deciding other people are engaging in “willful self-deception” about their own motivations and so forth; not unless you’d like that critical lens turned sharply back on yourself.
For example: RM, I could speculate that from here it looks like you’re the one who wants a “cookie” for -not- engaging in sex work, for whatever deep-seated reasons of your own, and are furious that someone who did make that choice is getting any attention and validation at all. And that for a while now in these “discussions,” you’ve been working out some serious rage that has little or nothing to do with the subjects at hand, all the while rationalizing that it’s “for our own good,” sociopolitically speaking; when actually it’s not doing a damn thing except relieving some of your own frustrations at others’ expense.
but, you know, I don’t live inside your head, and thus can only speculate; and so generally -try- to go off the words that are actually on the page rather than mind-read, tempting as it is for me, always, to try.
So now it’s all just about the hypocrisy. Forget all the other stuff, if only hookers would stop lying to themselves & pretending to have feminist ideas in their empty little heads, you stand ready to give them an absolving hug. How appetizing.
‘Except if you’d remember waaaay back at the very start, 10,000 years ago, we had KH saying that prostitution was feminist & empowering & half a dozen other buzz words …’
You’re getting your bloated parasitic whores confused. I never said any such thing. Or is every single word you say – yes, including ‘and’ & ‘the’ – a lie? My thing was that abolitionist rhetoric about the inherently violent, coercive nature of sex work is incoherent, & that their policy proposals hurt sex workers, all of them. I mostly leave empowerment to subtler minds. And I agree that a lot of the rhetoric, not particularly here but in general, is overblown:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/38558
But empowerment is about power. Power comes from increasing the range of alternatives open to women, not foreclosing any. Women choose sex work, like they choose anything else, because they judge it their best option in this world, not some other.
‘ … an inalienable right to masturbate inside another human being …’
You mean inherent, not inalienable. And nothing anyone has said here involves any such right. A trick with no money is out of luck, right or no right. A trick is out of luck if there’s no hooker around who’ll consent, right or no right. If really were such a right, no man would ever be sexually frustrated, there’d be wholesale fucking on the streets & in the church pews, everywhere, all the time, whether women consented or not.
‘ … ignoring the ones who get screwed over by full legalization …’
You beg the question. My point is that all sex workers are advantaged by decriminalization. It’s precisely the ones who want out, who most need help, who’re most hurt by current law & policy. Abolitionists argue that women are hookers only because their only alternative is starvation, homelessness, death. And many hookers do have only very bleak alternatives. But simply taking away the thing that, however loathsome to them, staves off starvation, homelessness, death, leaves them then with what? Starvation, homelessness, death. Women choose sex work because their other options are worse. Forcibly abolishing sex work leaves them with the worse options, the ones they’d rather be sex workers than accept. This is as true when the alternatives are terrible as when they’re the ones that the middle class enjoys. The only way to help anyone is to afford her better alternatives. Prohibition makes things worse, not better. And illegal markets are inherently violent (alcohol during Prohibition, drugs); criminalization leaves hookers outside the protection of the law, creates a climate of impunity that costs some of them their lives. In lieu of rational arguments against this view, you offer mostly semi-literate misogynistic hate speech.
The alacrity with which abolitionists seek to foment antagonism between ‘privileged’ & other sex workers is disgusting, a crude attempt to arrogate to themselves a moral authority they haven’t earned. Like any ad hominem argument, it has absolutely no bearing on the real question of what law & policy best serves women, including poor, addicted, & trafficked women, who do sex work. It seeks – hopelessly – to elide the ties of interest & experience that bind sex workers of all kinds. Sex workers themselves recognize these attempts to split them for what they are. And really, Mildred, what have you ever done for a single whore, bloated, parasitic, or otherwise? More than me?
So is all your bile really just about hookers’ use of feminist language, which you deem them unentitled to? If they’d just shut up & accept your understanding of them, & of feminism, then you’d deign to hug them for honestly, truthfully knowing their station? I don’t even believe that. You’ve already said too much. We know what you think, & there’s no taking it back. You’ll always view sex workers with a large measure of contempt, & they’ll always remember. Whores have long memories.
God, Anthony, you’re one ginormous dick, aren’t you? Can you get through a tirade directed at RM without making sexual suggestions like “kiss it” or some of the nastier ones like “stick it up your… [something not on the body but still sort of implying that you badly wish you could say what you really mean]” you threw out there at B|L’s site?
If you knew anything about RM, you’d know she’s anything but anti-sex, dude. But it’s much easier for you to get on the warpath if she’s Mildolph Hitler, huh?
You give pro-feminist men a bad name.
I gotta say that language like “masturbate inside another human being” to describe sexual relations that one doesn’t approve of doesn’t exactly scream “sex-positive” to me; but, hey, whatever. it’s getting hot in here again, and not in a good way.
‘I’ve gotta say that …’
And every time I read the word ‘pornstitution’ my IQ drops 4 points. Merits of the argument aside, the rhetoric desperately needs a makeover.
RM (et all)
The level your tone here at the end has reached pure out condescending. It honestly makes me think you really do not give a crap about women who sell their bodies (in any manner) and do not, for one second, think of them as humans, but rather mobile, breathing, complacent accomplices in “the patriarchy’s quest to get off”. Fine, you don’t think sex work can be empowering or feminist. You don’t have to. But suggesting that any woman involved in such work is deluded and lying to herself and more or less mentally flawed and incompetent is downright offensive, hateful, and well, wrong. Your tone of superiority is tantamount to epic hubris. Unless you have mastered the art of global wide telepathy and possess full scope of understanding regarding human motivation and psychology, you could not possibly know what any woman other than yourself truly finds empowering, liberating, feminist, whatever…yet that does not stop your from judging, and yes, I mean judging, anyone and everything that does not fall neatly in step with your party line.
Whoring, of any kind, is not going anywhere. So long as people are willing to buy, and yes, WILLING to sell sex, people will do it. I also know there are plenty of women out there more than happy to use men for sex, status, and financial gain. It’s a business, and it can be both dangerous yet lucrative. Maybe you should take a step back and stop judging people who might actually enjoy the way they make a living, especially if they do see problems in the industry as a whole and are trying to change/help the situation. Not everyone is going to approach a problem with the same tactics you have chosen, but thinking there is only one way (your way) to solve a problem is not only erroneous, it is going to alienate a lot of people from even considering working with the likes of you. Sex workers are already viewed as criminals, and often, the pitiably scum of the earth, any particualar reason you feel the need to insult them even further? The last thing they need is your superiority and judgment.
PunkAss Marc
Will you marry me? Or at least let me blow you?
Ok fine.
…
“You see, RM, a real woman is not quite the reduction to a blow-up doll that you take her to be; she has nerve endings, feelings, and emotions. There is a reason why a woman just might allow a man’s penis (or a dildo, or a vibrator, or her fingers, or whatever object may subsitute) inside her vagina: IT FUCKING FEELS GOOD. To tell women that seeking consensual pleasure is to be condemned merely because it violates certain “feminist” principles is not only unconsciously dense and unfeeling; it is fundamentally fascist and…dare I say it…antifeminist. Oh…and what would you say about a man going down on a woman with his toungue and fingers; would that be considered by you to be “using the woman as a sex object”??? I mean, we are talking about a real living woman’s vagina, not a Fleshlight.
Last time I checked, most men who have consensual sex with women — whether they pay for it or not — do happen to have at least a fleeting concern with the woman’s feelings….as in, whether the woman actually gets as much pleasure from the encounter as they (the guys) get.”
OK, this was too funny to ignore. Are you seriously arguing that men who use prostitutes care if the woman they are sticking their penis into it ENJOYS it? And are you seriously arguing that yes she does indeed enjoy it? All those lucky prostitutes getting five or ten orgasms per night from those johns who don’t think she’s a blow-up doll – oh no they don’t. Thanks for clearing that one up Anthony.
I can’t believe everybody let you get away with this bullshit. This is why it’s so hard to argue with many prostitution advocates, you seem almost completely detached from reality. Here’s a clue – most prostitutes use disassociation to get through the experience.
First off, Marc, the phrase “Kiss it” wasn’t meant in the sexual tense; it was meant in the “I don’t really give a care anymore about what you think about me” sense. I’d rather have someone like Nina Hartley kiss my booty anyway….provided that I get the opportunity to kiss hers in return.
RM may not be as anti-sex as, say, Jerry Falwell or the Feminists Against Sex crowd….but in my view her absolute personal disgust with those women whose sexual practices and beliefs differ from her own comes pretty damn close to being anti-sex…and thus, my view of her stands.
And for the record, I long since ceased to being a “pro-feminist man”…if by that definition you mean someone who simply parrots antiporn feminism of the MacDworkinite school of thought. If that makes me in your mind an “antifeminist”….well, you can’t please everyone.
Now, to Delphyne:
Hell yes, dear..I’m more than just implying; I’m stating flat out that some, if not most men who frequent prostitutes or consume porn, do in fact actually care a bit more than you think about the women whom they pay for the services they offer. The fact that some men do NOT care as much does NOT erase the basic fact that other men do…and all your attempts to paint clients as innate rapists looking for the next rubber doll to use and dispose of just won’t wash away that fact.
I really, really hate to break this to ‘ya, Delphyne (not really), but for most women, consensual sex with a man (or group of men) really does feel pretty damn good, and penises aren’t the evil that you and your colleagues make it out to be. (And please note the adjective “CONSENSUAL”; contrary to your thinking, I still happen to know the difference between consensual sex and rape….and it is more than just lack of consent; it is motive and intent of direct physical and bodily harm.)
I’m not saying — and I have never said — that there aren’t sex workers who do happen to fit into your neat and tiny caricature as permanent victims and damsels in distress needing rescue by the Feminist Vice Squad, and those should indeed be helped to get out to the fullest extent possible. But to say that these women who do defend their profession are simply lying when they say that they really do enjoy the sexual aspect of their profession is nothing less than an arrogant and elitist and totally willfull smear and distortion…in other words, a damn lie.
Call it “bullshit” if you will, Delphyne….but it is real.
Back to Marc:
Funny..I thought that you had dismissed B|L as an antifeminist?? Why would my remarks (which were addressed to radfems and antiporn fascists in general; not to anyone in particular) in her blog matter to you so much.
I think that I’ve caused enough trouble for today…if you want to play some more, I’ll be at my blog, thinking about the next human blow up doll that I want to masturbate inside.
Late,
Anthony
Anthony, men who pay women for sex are concerned with their pleasure, not the woman’s. Women who are being paid to have sex are doing it for the money not sexual pleasure. I really hope that some of the pro-prostitution feminists here will put you right because I don’t think even they would condone or support your delusions.
Anthony & Delphyne:
It depends on the man/situation. Some are concerned if you are enjoying your work and what you are getting paid for is something you enjoy as well. They make the effort to see that the professional gets turned on/gets off too. Some do not give a rats ass if you enjoy it or not, after all, they have paid you for a service, and that service is seeing that they get off. Sometimes it is enjoyable, sometimes, it’s not.
Fair enough?
RenEv….exactly.
I never said that ALL encounters were pleasurable; only that most tend to be, for whatever reason.
And the fact remains that many women who do sex work do in fact get at least some measure of sexual pleasure from their work, in addition to the value of the money earned for time spent.
The only delusions here, I state, is in Delphyne’s view that women’s testimonies be accepted for what they are.
And BTW…what about women who pay MEN for sex (yes, that does exist)….are they merely reducing men to their penises for sexual pleasure?? Or are those women just as much dupes of patriarchy as the men who pay for such services do???
Sorry, Del, but you will just have to do your job of “putting me right” on your own…”pro-prostitution feminists” aren’t going to do your dirty work for you.
Anthony
Who is this guy? What can I say, Delphyne, sometimes you meet your match. This laissez-le-bon-temps-rouler, multiorgasmic concept of sex work, if it’s intended to generalize to the experience of most sex workers, really is risible, indeed offensive to those – hardly a ‘tiny’ number – whose experience is painfully, grotesquely different. Sex work, in this life anyway, is not some polymorphous-perverse utopia. It’s work. Sometimes tolerable, sometimes not, but work. For many – many, not a tiny number – women it’s the bitter culmination of a life of horrible abuse. The quality of workplace orgasms is the least of their problems. And their circumstances are hardly a footnote; they’re among the morally most important facts of the matter. It hardly helps these women that many others have it better, that outside the most degraded precincts, some loser clings for dear life to the hope (as we see here) that she might really find him charming, desirable, fun, sexually competent. That he really didn’t have to pay.
A clarification here:
I do not doubt or deny in any way, shape, or fashion that there is a lot of very real abuse happening in sex work, or that many women do get into it from very harsh and bitter circumstanses. I no more believe in the “laissez-le-bon-temps-rolez” school of sex work as an generalization than I believe the “sex slavery” argument.
The facts remain, however, that between those two extremes, there are the majority of sex workers who tend to fall in the middle of the “bell curve” when it comes to their experiences with prostitution or porn. Most women experience some good, somm bad; some delightful and some frightening experiences; some generally respectful clients and a few assholes; and usually come out of it with their wits and brains intact, yet affected in some way by their experience.
Those that do suffer from their negative experiences as sex workers should be as respected for their experiences and given the full gamut of services to help them deal with their experiences as those who benefit greatly.
In short, KH, I am by no means denying the hardships of those whose sex work experiences aren’t so rosy and kind and orgasmic; as I am defending the rights and legitimacy of those who do support their profession. Nothing more, nothing less.
This won’t change anybody’s minds on this issue, but at least it clears up my views.
Anthony
BTW…a bit of a correction on the following:
“The only delusions here, I state, is in Delphyne’s view that women’s testimonies be accepted for what they are”
Just add the words “should not” between the words “testimonies” and “be”, and you will get the point I wanted to make.
Sorry for the error.
Anthony
I have to say something about these john delusions about what’s going on between a prostitute and her client. A gentleman of my aquaintance recently told me he “aims to please” , and later on saying he works at it to “satisfy”, but wishes they would “just shut up and stop all the screaming”.
That said it right there. She’s faking it (been there done that) and he thinks drilling away or is bringing her to orgasm.
So it’s the whole lie of it, the whole god damn lie of it, that is so wrong, that just depresses the fucking shit out of me.
I see the “exploitation vs empowerment” debate has reared its head. As coincidence would have it, the next in a series of excerpts I was planning to post from the Bitch interview with the editors of $pread covers this topic, so I made sure to post about it today. The post can be found here.
“I never said that ALL encounters were pleasurable; only that most tend to be, for whatever reason.”
Only if you are talking about it from the man’s point of view. I’m sure most encounters are pleasurable for johns, for many reasons.
But that’s one of the problems with men and their sexuality, they seem to be trained to believe that if they feel something, then they can project it on to the woman they are feeling it about. That’s why the phrases “she’s asking for it” or “she’s gagging for it” are so popular amongst certain sections of male society. They can project their feelings of “asking for it” and “gagging for it” on to the woman and sadly society approves. They don’t know what is going on in her head or her body but it doesn’t stop them deciding that they do. Male desires do not necessarily equal female desires no matter how strongly you wish it did.
Prostitutes are having sex for the money, like KH says to them it’s work. Most of them are not experiencing sexual pleasure. I’d have thought only the creepiest johns would demand the woman’s orgasm on top of their paid right of access.
Back to Marc:
Funny..I thought that you had dismissed B|L as an antifeminist?? Why would my remarks (which were addressed to radfems and antiporn fascists in general; not to anyone in particular) in her blog matter to you so much.
————————-
I don’t think, Anthony, anyone accused me of that. Sister fucking? That was McBoing’s concern b/c he didn’t understand what I meant by the term “fuck feminists” — which was actually a ref to fuck feminists week on the when another blogger decided to depict poor white women as the products of incest, as if it goes on more among the poor, or somesuch.
And thanks KH for the comments about sex work as work. That’s what I’d tried to say to Anthony on the thread that started all this.
Odd…
I hear “is this okay?” and “are you enjoying this?” way more often than I hear “You asked for it.”
But RE, it’s “them,” not “you.” Can’t you get used to being ignored and hearing yourself talked about in the third person? I don’t know what’s wrong with you.
anyway, thank you to both KH and RE.
everyone else…dudes, I dunno. take it to the corn. or something.
(I’ve only ever heard “gagging for it” from the best friend, usually said of himself when he’s hungry or craving a drink or something. maybe it’s an other-side-of-the-pond thing)
I ask this not because I necessarily think that this is what RM’s post is about, but just because I’m curious where you all stand on the idea:
Can you both denounce an act or practice as anti-feminist and still support the individual women involved in it? In other words, can I rip a practice as an idea without also suggesting the women involved in it are worthless? Seems like there’s a difference between being against prostitution and being against prostitutes to me…
I’m not RE, obviously, but since that question applies to other things as well, I’m gonna say: even if it is hypothetically possible, somehow it never seems to work out that way.
I don’t know what “anti-feminist” means anyway, to be perfectly honest. in this context it seems rather silly as an epithet. the people who are the worst exploiters probably don’t give a flying rat’s arse about “feminist creds.” As for people who do put sex work into a feminist context: people just don’t seem to be hearing what they’re actually saying. and perhaps vice-versa.
…and I read that post too fast & mistook the ref to RM as addressing it to RE. ignore that bit, thanks.
“I hear “is this okay?” and “are you enjoying this?” way more often than I hear “You asked for it.””
But are you enjoying it, RE? And how often do you have to pretend you are (I’m not expecting an answer because I realise that’s rather personal)? I’m guessing you can’t say “Actually this is shit, hurry the fuck up will you” if you are being paid.
——
“Can you both denounce an act or practice as anti-feminist and still support the individual women involved in it? In other words, can I rip a practice as an idea without also suggesting the women involved in it are worthless?”
It’s the same as being against sweatshops, but not being against the people who work in them, as far as I can see PunkAssMarc.
——
“(I’ve only ever heard “gagging for it” from the best friend, usually said of himself when he’s hungry or craving a drink or something. maybe it’s an other-side-of-the-pond thing)”
It’s a UK thing, BD. Men say about women – “she’s gagging for it”. Actually it’s them that are gagging for it but somehow that never gets a mention. Much easier to hide behind women.
:::It’s the same as being against sweatshops, but not being against the people who work in them, as far as I can see PunkAssMarc.::
I think a more accurate comparison here is if you’re a union organizer and yet your find the workers you’re trying to organize aren’t interested because they are perfectly happy with their jobs.
Those organizers are against capitalism, true, but they are also against workers who won’t get on board the opposition to capitalism klew train with them.
“scabs”
and yeah, I guess I’m not clear on why it’s inherently worse to be pretending you like your (sex work) job on any given day when you’re actually bored, wishing you could get home and watch your tv show, actually murder the annoying client, whatever; as opposed to pretty much any other job where one has to do this.
“Hi! My name is -perky- and I’ll be your waitron for this evening! Ask me about our specials!!!”
“Yes sir. No problem, sir. You have a -great day.-”
just sayin’.
“I think a more accurate comparison here is if you’re a union organizer and yet your find the workers you’re trying to organize aren’t interested because they are perfectly happy with their jobs.”
I’ve worked for a trade union, and part of my job was persuading people to join and I didn’t have any negative feelings with the people who didn’t want to. That was their choice. If you are talking about organised workplaces where people take the benefits of unionisation e.g. collective bargaining, but don’t want to join up, that’s something rather different.
I’d like to know where you get your information that most prostitutes are happy with their jobs and think that prostitution is a fine thing, BitchLab. So far all we’ve seen from the pro-prostitution side is criticism of surveys which show that most prostitutes are unhappy with prostitution and want to get out. You don’t appear to have any data of your own though.
As far as I know, BL’s “data” has come in the form of personal friends and neighbors.
and I do not read her as saying “most prostitutes are happy with their jobs and think prostitution is a fine thing” here, or anywhere.
so delphyne: how do you feel about unionization for sex workers?
“If you are talking about organised workplaces where people take the benefits of unionisation e.g. collective bargaining, but don’t want to join up, that’s something rather different.”
do you see a parallel of this in the current debate (here or elsewhere)?
“do you see a parallel of this in the current debate (here or elsewhere)?”
No I don’t. Do you? You appear to be insinuating that there is a parallel.
‘Can you both denounce an act or practice as anti-feminist & still support the [bloated parasitic whores] involved in it?’
Yeah, why not.
Come on, KH. I explicitly said I wasn’t implying that was RM’s position. I was just asking a related question.
I dunno. I wondered why you brought it up.
slippage, responding to delphyne.
Honestly, the “I totally support you, I just -really really- disapprove of your choices, and generally see you as a poor degraded soul needing of rescue, if not actual condemnation” reminds me too much of genteel homophobic sentiment (no, I am not saying that anti-prostitution people are homophobes) to ever really sit comfortably with me. Others’ mileage may vary.
BD:
“But RE, it’s “them,” not “you.” Can’t you get used to being ignored and hearing yourself talked about in the third person? I don’t know what’s wrong with you. “
Eh, I am getting more and more used to it every day…
Marc:
“Can you both denounce an act or practice as anti-feminist and still support the individual women involved in it? In other words, can I rip a practice as an idea without also suggesting the women involved in it are worthless? Seems like there’s a difference between being against prostitution and being against prostitutes to me…”
Marc, sure you can, but rarely does it seem to come across that way. Generally, the hatred of the practice spills out all over the women involved in it, with the people against it painting any women who attests to her involvement in the profession of hooking (or porn, or stripping) as a choice as women who are flawed, weak, damaged and not capable of making their own decisions regarding, well, much of anything let alone right of domain over their own bodies. Also, women who choose to do it are painted as apologists, enablers, and anti-feminist because often their views on “how to deal with the problem” are not the same as those of others.
Delphyne:
It’s cool, I’ll answer that. I have the luxury (and yes, I realize it is exactly that) of generally choosing who I will see and who I will not. That being said, I enjoy it about 45% of the time, about 30% of the time I am indifferent, and about 25% of the time I am, at least mentally, saying “hurry the hell up, there are 500 things I would rather be doing now.” However, I also have a few guys I see regularly who I would honestly do for free because I enjoy them that much (and I am happy they have not figured that out yet). I almost always enjoy the stripping part of my job, as well as the porn part, though I have bad days there too. Point is, I could be doing anything, from waiting tables to running a fortune 500 company and have bad days where I wished I was doing anything else. Everyone has bad days “on the job”, and that’s what all this is…a job. Yes, a lot of people do have issues; moral, feminist, whatever, with me (or other women) “selling intimacy” but I just don’t look at it that way. Sex is a biological act that gives pleasure. I really do not look at what I do as any different from what a massage therapist or personal trainer does. I use my body and skills to make people feel good, it’s that simple. And I think that, the fact that I see nothing wrong with it or do not feel lesser for doing so, really freaks people out. And I do not know what to say to that really. To me, it’s just sex, and sex, even with your ideal mate, is not going to be great every single time. Sure, there are times I have bad days at work, but it is, in my head, no different from having a bad day in any other job.
In truth, what gets my goat more than anything is the superior attitude I take from people who feel they have the right, for whatever reason, to judge me for what I do, and often solely by that criteria alone. Pity combined with superiority is more of a turn off towards the whole of the human race than any asshole client.
Once again, just speaking for me, not every women involved in any line of sex work.
Delphyne,
Three points. You have anecdotal testimony here. (I recognize that some abolitionists not only deny that these positive self-reports generalize, but insult or otherwise seek to discredit the women who offer them.) Any such testimony, even a single case, disproves at least abolitionist claims about the intrinsic character of sex work.
Second, the quality of the alternatives a woman foregoes when she chooses any job reflects on her attitude to it. Women who had minimally decent alternatives to sex work can be inferred to like their work at least as much as the rejected alternatives.
Third, there is in fact a research literature that suggests that sex work is vastly more diverse than you imagine. I don’t have a complete bibliography handy, but there are at least these:
Brents, Barbara & Kathryn Hausbeck, “Violence & Legalized Brothel Prostitution in
Nevada,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 2005 (20) 270–295.
Bryant, Clifton, & Eddie Palmer, “Massage Parlors & ‘Hand Whores’,” Journal of Sex
Research 1975 (11) 227–241
Chapkis, Wendy, Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labor (NY: Routledge, 1997).
Chapkis, Wendy, “Power & Control in the Commercial Sex Trade,” in Ronald Weitzer (ed.), Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography & the Sex Industry (NY: Routledge, 2000).
Dalder, A.L., Lifting the Ban on Brothels (The Hague: Netherlands Ministry of Justice, 2004).
Decker, John, Prostitution: Regulation & Control (Littleton, CO: Rothman,
1979)
Foltz, Tanice, “Escort Services,” California Sociologist 1979 (2) 105–133
Perkins, Roberta, & Frances Lovejoy, “Healthy & Unhealthy Life Styles of Female Brothel Workers and Call Girls in Sydney,” Australian & New Zealand Journal of Public Health 1996 (20) 512–516
Prince, Diana A., A Psychological Study of Prostitutes in California & Nevada, Doctoral
dissertation (San Diego, California: United States International University, 1986)
Romans, Sarah, Kathleen Potter, Judy Martin, & Peter Herbison, “The Mental & Physical
Health of Female Sex Workers,” Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 2001
(35) 75–80.
Rubin, Gayle, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in C.
Vance (ed.), Pleasure & Danger (Boston: Routledge, 1984).
Rubin, Gayle, “Misguided, Dangerous, & Wrong: An Analysis of Antipornography Politics,” in A. Assiter and A. Carol (eds.), Bad Girls & Dirty Pictures (London: Pluto, 1993)
Verlarde, Albert, “Becoming Prostituted,” British Journal of Criminology 1975 (15) 251–263
Weitzer, Ronald, “New Directions in Research on Prostitution,” Crime, Law & Social Change 2005 (43) 211-235
Woodward, Charlotte, Jane Fischer, Jake Najman, & Michael Dunne, Selling Sex in Queens-
land (Brisbane, Australia: Prostitution Licensing Authority, 2004)
‘Come on, KH. I explicitly said I wasn’t implying that was RM’s position.’
Okay, but just hypothetically, if she did say some such thing, what would you conclude?
I think you actually need to provide some internet links so it’s possible to see the research that’s being discussed, KH.
I was specifically asking for a survey that shows that the majority of prostituted women want prostitution legalised and that they don’t want out of the life as soon as possible. Both sides can produce anecdotal evidence, but a wider survey gives a clearer picture of the reality of prostitution.
A lot of what you link to appear to be uncritical commentary on prostitution. I mean does “Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” actually reflect what women in prostitution actually feel about what they do? I’m guessing not.
oh jeezus. delphyne, you know, it is possible to go hunt up research that isn’t actually on the internets. it may take a little longer, but such is life.
Here’s a link for you for starters, KH (and a bit of info for Anthony) -
http://www.viceland.com/issues/v11n3/htdocs/the_vice.php
“FUCKED BY YOUR DAD
Second-wave feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon made up this cruel stereotype that everyone in the sex industry got fucked by their dad. What do they know about it? Shit, that’s not fair. I mean, I got fucked by my dad, and every single woman I’ve met in the industry (stripping, prostitution, internet, phone sex…everything) got fucked by her dad, but…oh shit, wait. It is true. I guess that’s why we can lie underneath someone who has no business being on top of us and not give a shit. Statistics on incest are hard to gauge, but when you look at the number of women in the industry today and consider the fact that they ALL got fucked by their dad, it kind of makes your stomach turn.
PS: If your dad never fucked you and you’re not a lesbian, quit now. Otherwise you will hate all men forever.
……
ORGASMS
Whores cum on the job about once a career. Sorry, but if a clit gets pounded seriously and systematically enough, it may just send an orgasm to the brain. Also, about 25 percent of your clients are going to want to eat you out (I know, it’s weird), and that can be a nice break that may lead to the dreaded “ho-gasm.” The time it happened to me, the guy was so gross and I was so disgusted with the whole thing that I ended up cumming just out of how uncumworthy the whole thing was. You know?
…………
ZZZZZZZZZ
Falling asleep. This skill, otherwise known as disassociation, comes in handy. It usually sets in around hour three of sucking a rich cokehead’s limp cock. The old daddy-fucked-me thing means most whores are old friends with disassociation. You can get a lot done while you’re disassociating, like thinking about that girl you knew in third grade and trying to remember her name, or deciding which movies you’re going to put in your queue on Netflix.
Sometimes you can go so far with it that you actually fall asleep, and if that happens, you’re fucked in every sense of the word. You’re either going to get raped without a condom or have your face punched in. The only hos I know who survived falling asleep were the ones who were with those weirdo subservient guys who want you to laugh at their small dick and then let them eat you out for half an hour. Those guys are fucking disgusting and depressing and they are about as good as whoring gets. Got it?”
Oh fucking lovely. I dig the scarcasm, being a fan and all, but really. Not all of us have been fucked by our dads. And that is freaking stereotype that puts me over the edge and does nothing but help a wholesale image of victimization for not only us poor whores but ANY woman who has been abused or molested. Hell, not all women in sex work have been molested, and there are a ton of women who have been molested who are not whores. Why do they get to be seen as thinking, rational people when us whores (survivors or not) obviously cannot be?
Women, whores or not, who have been molested or abused often have serious issues with men and intimacy and sex as a whole…but lets just use that stereotype on the whores…
oh, and here…
http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/346bias.html
a study on how studies and statistics are flawed (sorry, could not help it)
http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/Content?oid=26820&category=34029
farley vs. Coyote & other sex workers…interesting reading anyway
Delphyne,
You have very strong opinions on this subject, & evidently a high degree of certainty that your empirical judgments are true. Have you never read any of this literature? How rational is it to be so self-certain about a contingent matter of fact if you haven’t seen the evidence?
Most of the literature isn’t online, at least not free. You have these choices: deny the research exists; dismiss the findings w/o seeing them (I know in your epistemology findings reported by men are inherently dubious, at the very least); go to the library. In order to fully participate in the discussion, you need to do the last. We’ll wait until you get back.
Gayle Rubin [1984] discusses the then-extant literature, & also the confused conceptual underpinnings of views like yours. I don’t recall whether it reports new findings, but think not. Same w/ Weitzer [2005] (which is online, as is another by him.) Everything else reports new data.
Oh, okay, “fucked by dad.” there’s the kind of lucid, objective, empirical/statistical research we’ve been looking for.
delphyne, what exactly is your personal stake in all of this? I mean, I know what mine is; and I know what the sex workers talking here is; and I know what that of the people who’ve been there and done that and had a horrible abusive time is. I’m not at all clear what your deal is. but, as kh says, you do seem to feel really really strongly about this. and, I’ve observed, about other related issues that have nothing to do with actual money changing hands (consensual BDSM, say). seriously, what is up?
Delphyne,
‘… whoring—in any form—is hell, & the only reason women do it is to get money for coke NOW!’
‘ … humiliating a woman (what sex work is all about)…’
‘ … prices seem to have gone down …’
‘Coke is what this whole industry is about. The majority of the clients are doing it in some capacity, & so are all the hos.’
‘…women in the industry today … ALL got fucked by their dad …’
‘In this business EVERYONE hates everyone else.’
‘…we all LOVE drinking pink cider.’
‘The average sex worker’s career is six months.’
‘He will never marry you.’
In general, if it doesn’t fit this person’s preconception, it’s not ‘real.’ Thanks for the reference. I already have a general sense of your taste in this kind of thing, but, really, I don’t see how the above helps your case.
Belledame222 raises an interesting question, & there’s a related one: why you should point specifically to this sort of dreck as confirmation of your views.
There is evidence & there are prior beliefs (to put it in Bayesian terms). We all have imperfect knowledge about what goes on between other people in private. We have our own experience, we have the reports of acquaintances, & we have research data of varying quality. But we also have prior beliefs. People differ in how heavily they weigh, how tenaciously they cling to, their presuppositions in the face of disconfirming evidence. Do you have any insight into your prior beliefs or why you weigh them so heavily when evaluating actual evidence? As belledame222 suggests, your damning generalizations about male sexuality, your response to disconfirming evidence & the women (& men, of course) who adduce it, & your Tourettish discourse on dicks, sucking, sucking cocks, the dicks that must be sucked, sticking his dick in it, etc, etc, all outside the context of sex work, do begin to raise questions about how you fit into the usual models of rational deliberation.
“pink cider”?
yep.
aw now see, I would love to stick around and watch this one rage on all night, but I have to go to work (after I do a bunch of coke and wonder how I manage to look in myself in the mirror, that is). Y’all have fun without me, since it is a forgone conculsion that my evening will be miserable.
RE,
Don’t forget your cider.
okay, went to the site. three thoughts in no particular order:
1) it sounds like Kassandra is or was having a truly wretched time, and I hope to hell she gets or has gotten out of it
2) I note that OAG has quotage from Lily Burana along with her other “evidence for the grim horror that is sex work” page. um, I know Lily B, at least online; while obviously I take her book as on the level as anything else she says, I doubt very much that she’d be too keen to see herself being talked about in this context. certainly she’s not turned to the abolitionist side.
3) call me dense, but I’m still not clear what “pink cider” is…
Pink cider is a kind of apple cider. It’s pink because of the Geneva apples’ red flesh. It has a berry-like aroma & a fresh, delicately bitter taste. The Geneva is rich in tannin. Like me, it’s lively, with persistent bubbles.
“oh.”
I gotta say this, not for the first time: I mean, yes, I’m a patriarchy-enabling pervert, that’s pretty well established. And yet on the whole the most unappetizingly graphic language/imagery (verbal) seems to come from the abolitionists, I have noticed. I mean, yes, there are porn sites that skeeve me (also); but you know, I’ve really had to go out of my way to look for ‘em.
or, alternately, just follow some of the links of the people who rage against it.
at any rate, I had never known the practical problems with, say, horsefucking porn before reading one particularly passionate and rather detailed diatribe against it (along with its advocates, I believe. which, the next time I meet one at a party, I will certainly tell him: haha, you can’t fool me! I know very well horsefucking is not good clean fun!)
…well, she amended, that, and: the porn or porn-esque stuff that skeeves me the most seem to hate and be disgusted by not only the women (and their bodies) but the men, too, really.
i mean seriously: if one were really “men and their various bodily functions, yay!” one would probably not be simultaneously virulently (male) homophobic. yet, there we are.
>And that is freaking stereotype that puts me over the edge and does nothing but help a wholesale image of victimization for not only us poor whores but ANY woman who has been abused or molested. Hell, not all women in sex work have been molested, and there are a ton of women who have been molested who are not whores. Why do they get to be seen as thinking, rational people when us whores (survivors or not) obviously cannot be?>
That is a point, yes.
Another way of looking at this is: the suggestion is that some abuse victims/survivors are worthier of dignity/empathy than others.
certainly i have been seeing this play out with at least a couple women, *not* sex workers–who are indeed abuse (sexual and otherwise) survivors, have been as bald and vulnerable about it as anyone else…and yet, because of a voiced difference of opinion wrt this stuff and related stuff, are basically treated like pariahs and worse by the very people whom you’d expect would be the most sympathetic (i.e. many of the radical feminists who are also passionately “anti”).
KH, again you’ve strayed into the territories of reading lists and insults, so once more it becomes very easy to ignore your posts. I can provide you long lists of books and articles you should read but it doesn’t actually add anything to the discussion.
I’m not quite sure why everybody has suddenly got so hysterical because I quoted the words of a prostitute. Is it because she isn’t singing the praises of the marvellousness of prostitution but instead is talking about her real experience?
On the rhetoric. This compulsive talk about sucking, warm wet holes, dicks, cocks to be sucked, the dick that must be sucked, sucking the boss’s dick, sticking it in, tepid arid holes, sucking the boyfriend’s cock, sucking the neighbor lady’s dick, the cock inside me, the thing that ate my knickers, that guy masturbating inside my live body (always ‘live’, leaving necrophiliacs where?), etc., etc. This is the low rhetoric of sexual violation. It needs renovation.
It can seem inauthentic. It certainly isn’t the language hookers I’ve known, including hookers in a bad way, use to describe their lives. Neither do most people who’ve ever had any real contact with them. There’s a flat quality, simultaneously over-graphic & under-specific, rote & prurient at the same time, that doesn’t ring true, especially to people whose lives it purports to describe (& who can be annoyed when their lives are appropriated as fodder for somebody else’s psychosexual drama.) If your sense of violation comes in any significant degree from within you, expresses your only own imaginative life, or what you’ve read to cultivate it, then your rhetoric will remain disablingly abstract. It’s odd that people who feel so passionately about the subject don’t spend more time with hookers, who could teach them a lot, including how to talk dirty.
It can have a manipulative, bullying quality. It conveys a sense that the speaker uniquely feels the violation women suffer, the authority of privileged access to someone else’s misery. That she knows the darkness that’s hidden from others. This is specious. People who disagree with abolitionist dogma, & who don’t routinely resort to such flamboyant rhetoric, are perfectly capable of (at least) equal concern for others, often with more basis in shared interests & experience. Talking dirty in the manner of a preadolescent child doesn’t accrue insight or moral authority.
It can be creepy. If the point were just self-expression, a chance to vent some kind of inchoate rage under color of concern for others, then it might not matter whether it conscientiously described anyone else’s life. But if the wellbeing of a despised & abused class of women really does matter, then abolitionists should presumably be anxious to get things right, & to persuade. And not to be seen to be more peculiar than they have to be.
Oh my God, KH you’re getting prudish about vulgarity.
This just gets better and better.
“hysterical.”
delphyne, are you sure you’re not a man?
I didn’t know how to spell overwrought.
You just did spell it. And I’m not ashamed to say I blush at the thought of your name.
You’re so sensitve KH. Maybe you should stay away from these discussions.
jeezus. Sure you don’t want to stomp off in another huff, delphyne? Or if you don’t want to leave in a huff, you can leave in a minute and a huff. And if you don’t want to leave in a minute and a huff, you can leave in a taxi.
Anyone else or just me?
what, noticing the decompensation? no, it’s not just you.
I didn’t stomp away in a huff belledame. Your insults were getting in the way of a discussion as KH’s are doing so now.
You both seem to have a bit of a problem sticking to the topic and often seem to prefer talking about me or any other anti-prostitution feminist who happens to be handy.
I’m still wating for the links that prove that prostitutes just love their work and want to do it forever.
I know I notice something, but can’t put my finger on it.
I’m still waiting for the links that show that prostitutes want pimps and johns legalised and plan on staying in the business forever.
I’m unaware of any data that sex workers plan on staying in the business forever. I doubt any exists. (Slinks away w/ tail between legs.)
OK, I’m still waiting for actual data from surveys or studies that show that the majority of prostitutes want pimps and johns legalised and don’t want out of the life *right now*.
Go to p. 218 of Weitzer (2005) for a quick lit. review. I checked & it’s online.
KH, I do you the courtesy of providing you with direct links and even some quotations so you can read it right here. What’s stopping you doing the same?
Don’t be a child. It’s not in front of me. You’ve got the title, you could have found it in less time than it took you to complain.
Well I’m waiting, even if delphyne’s gone to bed. I’m still waiting for the actual data from surveys or studies that show that the majority of prostitutes want pimps and johns legalised and don’t want out of the life.
Acvtually, I’m intregued. Do tell.
and I know for a fact Delphyne isn’t a man.
KH, you’re the only person here who has previously misrepresented a citation’s content to further your arguement, expecting checkable citations isn’t asking so much really.
Delphyne writes:
“I’m not quite sure why everybody has suddenly got so hysterical because I quoted the words of a prostitute. Is it because she isn’t singing the praises of the marvellousness of prostitution but instead is talking about her real experience?”
Give me a break, Delphyne. Are you sure this is even the writing of an actual sex worker? Or just somebody writing snarky shit in the persona of supposed sex worker. Something to piss off the SuicideGirls fans, right next to the fawning interview with the twin jailbait Nazi folksingers. I mean, were talking about Vice Magazine here.
Ultimately, I don’t know if the author of the piece really was a sex worker or not – Googling “Kassandra Marin” turns up nothing but that article. At best, the Vice article is one more sex worker anecdote out of many (and you’re the one who’s asking for hard date rather than anecdotes), at worst, its not even so much as an anecdote, but just somebody’s preconceived idea of what prostitution must really be like.
You -know- delphyne isn’t a man, w-w? like, in the Biblical sense?
I dunno. I think I need some hard data proving y’all aren’t actually a rugby team with extra Y chromosomes.
I mean, how can I know otherwise until you come up with a study?
and, it better be on the Internets. -with- a link. and statistics. and charts.
more seriously: when exactly did The Topic become “prove now that most prostitutes don’t want out of The Life Right This Minute?”
while i wait for an answer to that one, I’ll just be following that white rabbit; he seems to be in an awful hurry; it must be something important.
oh and as long as we’re going back toward unanswered questions:
1)delphyne, what’s your position on unionization for sex workers?
2) What is your personal stake in all this?
3) Can any of y’all play “Melancholy Baby?” If not, why not? Do you have statistics?
(I -may- have some of the Gayle Rubin at home; if so, I’ll be happy to type it up here. it’s gonna have to wait till I actually return home, though. i am perversely sort of enjoying the idea that this thread might actually still be going in a week).
Delphyne:
“I’m not quite sure why everybody has suddenly got so hysterical because I quoted the words of a prostitute. Is it because she isn’t singing the praises of the marvellousness of prostitution but instead is talking about her real experience?”
It’s not her account, per say, it is the pervading belief that ALL members of the “whore subspecies of homosapian” were repeatedly raped by daddy and junkies. That is what gets to me. I am neither, but you can bet the farm that is what people automatically think about me, and almost all women like me, without knowing jack and or shit about us. Even I admit there are times I REALLY dislike my work, but if I don’t hate it (and myseslf for doing it) all the time? Well, just not good enough. Not tragic enough.
Oh, and here, check out the Coyote site, the sex workers rights site, where you can find handy links for the World Charter for Prostitutes Rights & the North American Task Force on Prostitution…all three organizations have sex workers past and present in their member rosters and working towards things such as decriminalization. http://www.bayswan.org/COYOTE.html
And y’all have a nice way of pulling this maneuver…
“Sex worker who was abused and does drugs and hates her job and tells why she hates it and an rants about how shitty it is? Golden! Quote her, use her as THE EXAMPLE!”
“Sex worker who is okay with who she is and what she does and seems to be sane and rational and might even like her job?” Obviously lying or confused. Mock away!”
Here, have some happy whores…ones who consider themselves feminists as well!
http://www.counterpunch.org/hartley02022005.html
http://www.dazereader.com/anniesprinkle.htm (NWS)
http://www.counterpunch.org/nathan12112004.html
http://www.goodforher.com/about/girls.html
http://www.webgrrls.com/eva/feminism.html
“You saw the other girl on Nightline because that’s what the news people want to talk about. Who wants to see a happy porn star? It’s like a car accident. No one wants to pay attention to the traffic; they’d rather stare at the wreckage.”
-Christi Lake
No of “us” ever said all women in the sex industry were happy. But none of you seem even willing to consider that some women are…
waitwaitwaitwaitaminute. that KAsandra whosis article was ganked from “Viceland magazine?” never mind Prussian Blue; this one’s nice, too: and hey, yet more evidence about the disgusting degradingness of porn from someone who was there. well, -gay- porn; this author seems just fine with het porn. mm, misogyny, homophobia and sex-neg: do we have a trifecta? why yes! we do! and it’s so, so, so…titillating:
http://www.viceland.com/issues/v11n3/htdocs/lying.php
“The most ridiculous job I ever held down was copy editor/ghostwriter/ad designer for a series of gay porn magazines and three straight porn publications aimed at a more mature audience. Have you ever seen Over 40, Over 50, or Over 60? How about Black Inches or Latin Inches? Or White Inch? Yes sir, for three long weeks I was at the helm of all those stellar titles. And I had no clue what the hell I was doing. I was a 21-year-old college dropout, addicted to cocaine, with no computer knowledge, who lied in his interview like a seasoned criminal. “Are you fluent with Quark and PhotoShop?” Oh, sure. Isn’t everyone? “What school did you attend?” I was a double major at NYU, graduated top 10 percent of my class. “Do you have a problem with sexual content, gay or straight?” Fuck, no. All my friends are gay and I love it!
So I got the job, and an $85,000 salary plus benefits. I was the king of the world-—to celebrate, I bought myself an eightball and a blowjob. Then I actually had to do some work.
…I was so confused. I hadn’t hit my real deviant sexual peak yet. I thought I was kinky because I stuck baseball bats in girls’ pussies.
…When they asked me to correct something in Quark, I looked the word up in The Chicago Manual of Style. Debbie told me it was a computer program and opened it up on my desktop. I took one look at the toolbar and started to cry. You don’t bullshit your way through Quark. Nor do you try and write gay copy when you don’t like fags.”
***
Boy, that’s a stellar reference all right. I can see why you’re holding out for the -rilly legitimate studies- (on the Internets); clearly you guys are SERIOUS.
If it’s so easy to find, why didn’t you find it yourself? You had a computer in front of you, and you knew what article you were searching for; it would have been easier for you to find it by searching than for anyone else to find it.
It took me about ten minutes to find it (it would have been much quicker if you had provided the title of the article, or the publication) – Weitzer had three different articles regarding prostitution published in 2005, but only one included a page 218. The article, in .pdf format, is here.
Assuming I’ve even found the right article, that is. Page 218 does have a lot of references to support the idea that the majority of non-streetwalker prostitutes like their jobs and have healthy self-images. (What’s not addressed is what they think of legalization.)
Much earlier, Bitch Lab wrote:
I think this is a false dichotomy. No doubt some sex workers are themselves “do gooder white middle class feminists.” And given the racism and classism that would inevitably be part of any professional organization, they’d probably end up being at least some of (and perhaps dominating) the leadership of any such organization.
Yeah, I know that it’s odd to bring that up so much later. So I’m an odd person.
“…but just somebody’s preconceived idea of what prostitution must really be like.”
Reading through this Weitzer piece, which is one person’s opinion and nothing more, I am left thinking that’s exactly what we have here–(Weitzer’s) preconceived idea of what prostitution is like.
This is only an abstract, and an abstract of a commentary at that; not a study. We can’t know anything from an abstract. Neither can we know anything about his references without reading them in full study, not in abstract.
Is there conflict of interest here? I would like to see a declaration of conflict of interest from Weitzer.
Are you a john R. Weitzer?
“…but just somebody’s preconceived idea of what prostitution must really be like.”
“Reading through this Weitzer piece, which is one person’s opinion and nothing more, I am left thinking that’s exactly what we have here–(Weitzer’s) preconceived idea of what prostitution is like.
This is only an abstract, and an abstract of a commentary at that; not a study. We can’t know anything from an abstract. Neither can we know anything about his references without reading them in full study, not in abstract.”
What abstract? So far, the two mentions of Weitzer articles and both have linked to the full articles, not abstracts. Weitzer’s articles are not “studies” but review articles, evaluating other studies. Review articles, of course, are a perfectly valid and necessary part of scientific discourse.
“Is there conflict of interest here? I would like to see a declaration of conflict of interest from Weitzer.
Are you a john R. Weitzer?”
Why don’t you find Weitzer’s email address and ask him? I don’t think he reads this forum.
But, hey, who am I to call into question impeccable sources like Vice Magazine?
Ampersand did give us the full pdf of the Weitzer commentary. I misspoke. Regarding Weitzer’s references we have once again, only Weitzer’s opinion. Vice Magazine is a magazine not a scientific journal. We know what type of publication it is, and know we are not getting a scientific article. Weitzer’s commentary would more appropriately have been published in the popular press too, and then we wouldn’t have the confusion caused by this pretense of scientific rigour.
What?
“Weitzer’s commentary would more appropriately have been published in the popular press too, and then we wouldn’t have the confusion caused by this pretense of scientific rigour.”
Just how many scientific journals do you follow, Pony? Review articles of this kind are a standard part of most journals. Pretense of scientific rigor? Well, there are those of us who think Farely’s studies have a great deal of pretense of scientific rigor. What makes Farley’s work more “scientific” than Weitzer’s analysis? The fact that you happen to like Farley’s politics and not Weitzer’s?
Delphyne (et. all)
I don’t mind reading the words of prostitutes who dislike their jobs. What gets to me is the blanket assumption that anyone who works in the sex industry was raped by dad and is a junkie, because that is not true. I get tired of everyone who looks at/speaks to/speaks about women in the sex industry assuming that. Yes, in some cases it is true, but in some it is not, but you can bet the rent check everyone assumes that about all of us, and it gets old. Being seen as immoral, broken, subhuman junkie scum gets real old real quick.
Also I note it is a popular trend to find a woman who fits those stereotypes and hates her work (and herself for doing it) and use her as THE example, yet the words of those who are not that example…well, no reality or credit there. I am fairly certain that 90% everyone loves so much applies to street prostitutes almost exclusively, and it is probably damn accurate for them. But for all sex workers? No, I do not think so.
Oh, and here…links…
This one is for Coyote (http://www.bayswan.org/COYOTE.html), a sex workers advocate group who wants law reform (also has links for The North American Task Force on Prostitution, and The International Committee for Prostitutes’ Rights . All three are organizations with sex workers in the membership rosters who advocate various levels of law reform.
And here, a sampling of sex workers (who consider themselves feminist) who enjoy/ defend their work:
“You saw the other girl on Nightline because that’s what the news people want to talk about. Who wants to see a happy porn star? It’s like a car accident. [No one wants to pay] attention to the traffic; [they'd rather stare at the wreckage].’
-Christi Lake
http://www.counterpunch.org/nathan12112004.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/hartley02022005.html
http://www.dazereader.com/anniesprinkle.htm (NWS)
http://www.swop-usa.org/Harlot.php
gah, sorry about the more or less double post, this here interweb is messing with me.
Nice try, RenEv…but all those links you give will be easily dismissed by the likes of Delphyne and all the other antiporn feminists as mere tools of the male patriarchy who make millions off the rape and murder and degradation and invasion of women’s bodies.
Once again, a clarification for B|L: Yes, I do know that most sex work is indeed work, and that most sex workers are in it mostly for the survival. My point was that you simply cannot assume just because of that, that there can be no genuine pleasure generated within that particular sexual encounter, or that the woman involved can’t actually get some kind of physical pleasure in any way. Delphyne’s point seems to be that merely because there is an exchange of money for sex, there can be NO real pleasure for the woman in any way; the exchange of sexual favors for money automatically makes it offensive and patriarchial (other than, of course, the inequality issue of men “possessing” women and “invading” women with their evil penises).
As for the supposed testimonies proving the immutable destructiveness of sex work: Isn’t it interesting that the main sources for antiporn feminists to prove their case comes mainly from usually sources further to the Right, mostly based on fundamentally antifeminist beliefs about women reduced to traditionalist roles. (James Weaver’s fundamentalist diatribes masquarading as “studies” about porn destroying women’s “virtue” being used with flourish by antiporn feminists is but one example.) It is certainly no coincidence that most of these anti-”pornstitution” testimonies seem to get far more publicity in the broader publc than any testimonial from those sex workers who defend their profession.
Yet we are to believe that “pornstitution” is the centerpiece and the foundation of the patriarchy and of mass female oppression??? More so than even the traditional nuclear family, the Church, and the State?? In direct contradiction to most institutional propaganda, which seeks mostly to limit women’s sexual oppurtunities to marriage and reproduction???
BTW…here’s a link that RenEv missed to an organization that does more scientific and activist work for sex workers than almost any other:
The Network of Sex Work Projects
http://www.nswp.org/
Anthony
Does anyone else find Anthony’s righteousness on behalf of people he’d like to support the right to buy sex from off-putting?
McB:
Not particularly. I may not agree with everything Anthony says, but his brand of venom is not as offensive to me as some other folks.
Somewhat relieved by Anthony’s hilarious outing as a naif who believes the girls get off on him.
“Isn’t it interesting that the main sources for antiporn feminists to prove their case comes mainly from usually sources further to the Right, mostly based on fundamentally antifeminist beliefs about women reduced to traditionalist roles. (James Weaver’s fundamentalist diatribes masquarading as “studies” about porn destroying women’s “virtue” being used with flourish by antiporn feminists is but one example.)”
What are you talking about Anthony? Where has any anti-prostitution feminist referenced right-wingers on this thread? All the anti-prostitution feminists I know of refer to feminist sources or direct testimony from prostitutes themselves. Not to mention that many of the strongest feminist fighters against prostitution have experienced prostitution themselves. You appear to be making stuff up again.
“My point was that you simply cannot assume just because of that, that there can be no genuine pleasure generated within that particular sexual encounter, or that the woman involved can’t actually get some kind of physical pleasure in any way.”
Do you really believe that all the women you buy are getting pleasure from being paid to have their bodies used by you Anthony? Is that how you justify what you do to them to yourself?
Question…
Did Anthony ever say he frequented prostitutes? If so, I missed it.
R Mildred:
Late question. What are you referring to here?:
‘KH, you’re the only person here who has previously misrepresented a citation’s content to further your arguement, expecting checkable citations isn’t asking so much really.’
Which citation did I previously misrepresent? I think you may be confused.
I was wondering which citation that was, also. I, um, got distracted.
and yeah, I was not aware that Anthony frequented prostitutes. given his beliefs, I rather think he would have said so if he did.
and while in general I am finding the menfolk, and some of the womenfolk, a tad annoying here (sorry, had to say it), I gotta say that on the whole I find righteousness on behalf of something like “gives me pleasure” a lot more straightforward than some of the other peoples’ righteousness-on-behalf-of, which seems far murkier and squickier to me on the whole.
Ampersand,
‘If it’s so easy to find, why didn’t you find it yourself? You had a computer in front of you, & you knew what article you were searching for; it would have been easier for you to find it by searching than for anyone else to find it. It took me about ten minutes to find it (it would have been much quicker if you had provided the title of the article, or the publication) – Weitzer had three different articles regarding prostitution published in 2005, but only one included a page 218.’
Excellent question! You cut to the nub. Let me explain. Please understand, I didn’t even think this was my argument. I turn on my computer & there Delphyne is, demanding that somebody (I don’t even remember who) cough up references to some sort of studies. I put my 2¢ in & go about my business. I don’t re-read the whole thread, being busy with other things (don’t ask). You should also note that Delphyne has been very mean to me lately, & I think technically is still observing this rule she made up that she’s gonna ignore me (this is her 2nd or 3rd time, I think, in the last month). I try to act all smart & make these serious arguments & it seems like all she ever has to say isn’t even really that serious, not like she’s stupid but something’s going on. So we have this personal thing going, not really love-hate, but some kind of hostility, in case you really need to know. So I’m determined to play it cool & not get drawn into some argument that ends in tears & bitter recriminations. Again. Right? (Later on I’ll tell you what she said about me. It’s not as bad as Mildred but it’s still mean.) So she gets all huffy & says gimme the URLs, & I don’t even know if they all have URLs, so I say sorry, no can do. Anyway, there’s a lot of things that are easy to find, & I don’t have any reason to go find them all, & that’s really the answer to your question. It’s really her deal, I’m not even really paying attention to what she’s saying, & I already gave her the reference, which I did go to some trouble to do, probably more than the 10 minutes it took a certain person to find one simple article, & I figure she can find it herself in 5 seconds & she shouldn’t be depending on other people for every little thing & making up these ridiculous little petty grievances. I do her one favor & now she’s getting all high & mighty because I don’t do her another one. And I’m thinking, are these really competent adults making a big deal about this, like does this really advance our understanding of these issues, or is this really some kind of hanging offense seeing how she’s not talking to me anyway & this isn’t my argument anyway & does anybody really want to make some kind of big drawn out deal about this, not knowing of course that you’re gonna raise it again later, which is odd incidentally because of all the nastiness in this thread why would you only comment on this one unless it’s okay when somebody on your side acts badly. Whatever, I figured it wouldn’t take more than 5 seconds because I’d already specifically mentioned which one of the 2005 articles I was talking about when I gave her the list of references in the first place & anyway you can see right there on the screen that that’s the only one with a page 218 & you’re wrong about me not giving the title & the name of the journal, so all you’ve gotta do is copy & paste the title into Google & it pops right up. Anyway, long story short, it wouldn’t have taken you so long if you just paid attention.
‘Page 218 does have a lot of references to support the idea that the majority of non-streetwalker prostitutes like their jobs & have healthy self-images. (What’s not addressed is what they think of legalization.)’
You’re right about that one, different researchers ask different questions & they don’t all ask whether you like legalization, but I think Delphyne wanted data about more questions than just what do you think about legalization. But I could be wrong. Anyway, several of the papers you’re talking about were done in jurisdictions where prostitution is legal. The Netherland & Queensland & Nevada, I think. And if you ask someone how they like their legal job & they say great, I can see how, the way this debate is going, there’ll probably be some big argument about whether they still wish their legal job that they like was made illegal. I think this debate is lowering my IQ. So anyhoo, gotta run, bye!
(hee)
“‘Page 218 does have a lot of references to support the idea that the majority of non-streetwalker prostitutes like their jobs & have healthy self-images. (What’s not addressed is what they think of legalization.)’
They may. They may not.
You have no idea what those references say or support. You only have Weitzer’s word for that. You haven’t read the papers and studies he references.
In response to a previous question about why we should give more credence to Farley’s work than Weitzer’s; Farley used primary sources, Weitzer did a survery of other people’s work and gave us his opinion of that.
Pony, don’t be childish. In fact I do have copies of all the studies I included in the list I posted, which include the ones in question here. They’re available in any decent research library. So I do have an idea. We’re discussing Weitzer’s article in part because the others aren’t online & so can’t be discussed by people without the wit or interest to go to the library. When you make claims such as that I haven’t read these papers, you’re just making things up.
I do encourage you to smear Weitzer some more, please. The difference between the Farley & Weitzer papers is that the former is a methodologically incompetent & tendentious research report & the latter is a literature review article, a perfectly normal form, as you’d know if you had even passing knowleddge of any academic literature at all. Weitzer has, of course, also published reports of his own primary research & is, unfortunately from your point of view, a well-respected person in the field.
This is what passes for discourse in abolitionist circles.
I earn my living doing medical research for a consortium of academic physicians and my name is on the masthead of a medical journal, now. of course at one time I did what you CLAIM to do. I’m beginning to think you’re either a failure at that, or a troll, with all the time you spend here.
As for Weitzer, yes I know we are discussing his paper. We have been since before you arrived here, and I made my definitive comment on it then.
Indeed, Weitzer has publihed other articles. He references himelf several times in his opinion piece.
Weitzer in that set of references cites amongst other things an unpublished thesis, a out of print book published in 1979, and a paper on prostitution published by the Dutch government, which appears to have been published in Dutch and only has limited availability.
It’s not really going to be possible to critique any of those studies unless we pop round to Weitzer’s office and take look at his copies. So we’ll never know whether they were methodologically incompetent or tendentious. What we do know is that Weitzer quotes selectively from research to give a skewed picture as we saw from that BMJ article. This must be what passes for discourse in prostitution apologists’ circles.
KH has reduced to likening us both to children now I see Pony. Of course children often ask direct and useful questions which is why so many adults get pissed off with them.
Wow, whole hell of a lot of people not listening to what is being said by the other side, lotsa misinterpretation, lotsa bullshit if you ask me. I’m not going to waste my time copying and pasting to quote examples, though. Too many comments here already.
I just want to say this: Why are the sex-poz’s all fired up that we should find some mythical study or some mythical anecdotal evidence from a prostitute who would properly represent ALL PROSTITUTES? I mean, seriously. WTF? The street whore turning tricks to support a drug habit doesn’t represent everybody, the Asian woman sold by her parents and forced into prostitution doesn’t represent everybody, the fourteen-year-old trans kid whose parents beat the shit out of her so she had to run away from home and turn tricks to survive doesn’t represent everybody, so let me ask this: How the HELL does a $300-an-hour penthouse babe with lotsa lucre in the bank account and her own health insurance represent all of whoredom? Tell me that. I’m dying to know.
If we’re going to talk about the problems inherent in prostitution–and we should, because although the liars and elitists here are determined to twist this around to make whoring look like nothing more than an annoying low-paying McDonald’s or call center gig, those of us in the reality-based community know that’s not the case one bit–perhaps we should talk most about those areas of prostitution in which, OMGWTFBBQ, WOMEN ARE HAVING THE MOST PROBLEMS.
Duh.
If you LOOOOOVE being a whore and don’t mind one bit those fun moments where you no longer consent to what’s going on but you can reduce it in your own mind to merely “not having fun” then fine, that’s you. But really. If a crack-addled street prostitute isn’t the face of WOMEN WHO ARE COERCED INTO PROSTITUTION, YOU sure the hell aren’t. So shaddup.
Seriously, I ain’t going in for this coddling-the-opposition bullshit. Too many lives ride on this. Tell you what, let’s GET RID of all these circumstances wherein women must be forced into prostitution because they can’t survive any other way and THEN maybe we can talk about how great selling your ass for money is when you can afford to say no or no more.
But we aren’t there yet. So how about let’s quit slamming the radfems and try, JUST TRY, to actually give a damn about the specific women radfems are trying to help. Because I’m not seeing that concern here. I’m seeing downplaying, and it isn’t even from the women who are actually suffering (walk your talk or STFU, people)–it’s from women the patriarchy and prostitution are BENEFITING. Conflict of interest, in other words. Shame on you.