Don't be like that tea, I still think we can both get something out of the conversation even if we don't agree.
OK, I'll write that big post I was threatening. I haven't read the whole the last couple of pages so please forgive me if I cover points that have been gone over already.
My position is that the default opinion that prostitution is always bad, always exploitative and something no-one can ever really consent to is a result of the fact that feminist discourse is dominated by academic feminists who are by definition highly educated, invariably female-bodied, overwhelmingly white, middle-class and, if not necessarily rich, at least financially comfortable. To women like this, it's easy to say to themselves "There is no situation I can conceive of in which I would consent to doing paid sex work while still in my right mind. Therefore, any women who sell sex must have been forced into it through violence or the threat of violence, or - worse still - may believe they are 'consenting' to it but are actually too oppressed to realize how oppressed they are, and therefore cannot be considered to be in their right mind." Ergo, consenting to sex work becomes an oxymoron.
Now to reply to your specific points:
You don't have to have direct experience of sex-work to have an opinion. You DO need to be informed though, and there is plenty of research to show that decriminalization/legalization actually does nothing to improve safety, 'monitoring' by the law remains woefully inadequate, the majority of violence still goes unreported, it does not result in safer sex practices, and prostitutes are still stigmatized and discriminated against by society. These are all myths, playing into the hands of organised crime.
A great many prostitutes argue, contrary to this position, that criminalizing the purchase of sex makes their work MORE hazardous, not less. That's without even touching on the point that it's clearly stupid to criminalize the
sale of sex in the name of it being 'for their own good', any more than a state is 'protecting' people from drugs by jailing them for possessing small amounts of illegal substances for person use.
Here are a number of prostitutes arguing that criminalizing their punters would be a really bad idea:
http://prostitutescollective.net/2016/05/02/4888/
It's also the position taken by, for example, the English Collective of Prostitutes (although I dunno if they necessarily have all the answers - a quick look at
their website tells me they oppose compulsory health checks or HIV tests, which seems nuts to me, but anyway).
...criminal organizations who drive the sex industry...pimps, traffickers, the mafias...
The next point is that by bringing in sex work from the cold completely, i.e. not just decriminalizing it but fully legalizing it and regulating it, the whole criminal element could be cut out. This is almost so obvious that people miss it. You could make it illegal to profit from
someone else's sex work - which would remove madams/pimps from the equation - and even introduce legislation to require that immigrants have to have been settled in the country for some time, say a year or two minimum, before doing sex work. This would greatly reduce the financial incentive to traffickers, who are obviously looking to make a return on their dollar as fast as possible.
Pointing to the Netherlands or Germany and saying "They still have problems X, Y and Z" is not an argument against legalization, because we wouldn't have to take a carbon copy of their laws for our own. Indeed, we could look at what's worked over their, what hasn't worked, and learn from their mistakes.
And in any case, all this stuff goes on
in countries where prostitution is illegal anyway. Thinking that banning it makes it go away it just bizarrely naive.
.Strange that you of all people take an anti-academic line. You rightly say that more prostitutes' voices should be heard but that's hardly feminists' fault. Lots of research is carried out, they're not just making this stuff up!
I'm not 'anti-academic' by any means - what I'm 'anti' is anyone who thinks they can speak with absolute authority on behalf of other people, especially other people from totally different backgrounds and with totally different like experiences. From the VICE piece I posted above:
“Those on the side of the Nordic model [which makes it illegal to pay for sex] talk about giving ‘a voice to the voiceless’, but won’t listen to those of us who are shouting at the top of our lungs, who these laws will directly affect.”
Now of course I understand that different people will have different experiences of selling sex. A middle-aged woman who works in her own home and has a number of long-term clients she knows well, trusts and has a good relationship with is not in the same situation as a terrified teenager who finds herself walking the streets in a strange city, not speaking the same language as anyone she knows except the men who've put her in this position, and feeling unable to go to the police no matter what happens to her because she'll just get sent back where she came from and end up perhaps an even worse state.
This is about the normalisation of the commercialisation of women's bodies...
This is an interesting phrase. If you'll forgive me being glib, do you get equally furious when you see a group of blokes in hi-viz vests digging a hole in the road, or picking fruit in a field? Because what's that other than "the commercialization of men's bodies"? Indeed, what is *any* paid work other than the "commercialization" of someone's body and/or mind? It's legal to pay someone to do just about any activity that's legal in and of itself, so just what is it about sex work that makes so radically, qualitatively different from all other sorts of labour?
Yes yes, I know, gangs, pimps, trafficking etc. This line is basically saying "prostitution should be illegal because it's dangerous" without acknowledging that, in very large part, prostitution is dangerous because it's illegal. And while I appreciate there are places where it's not illegal (including the UK, technically), the gangs that run the trafficking operations are quite obviously illegal. No-one, least of all Jeremy Corbyn, is talking about legalizing their activities.
(Furthermore, you're also taking the classic anti-sex-work feminist line by assuming all prostitution involves women selling sex to men - that may account for most of the sex trade globally, but there are vast numbers of male prostitutes too - whether they sell sex to women or to other men - and another very significant population of transsexual/transgendered prostitutes.)
decriminalisation in New Zealand for example has done practically nothing to prevent 13 year old girls selling their bodies on the streets, and the men arrested for buying sex from minors still receive light sentences.
If agents of the law in New Zealand are turning a blind eye to the exploitation of children then that constitutes an argument that Kiwi coppers need to get their fucking act in gear. It doesn't constitute an argument that adults should be forbidden from earning a living as they see fit, any more than the fact that 13-year-olds sometimes get drug forms a good argument for an outright ban on alcohol.
No, it YOU who are confusing 'sexual desire' and 'intimacy' with the act of paying for sex. Women should not be made responsible and made to suffer for men's inability to build safe, sexual relationships based on respect, without having to buy another person's body. Quoting Rachel Moran (a survivor of prostitution who wrote the book 'Paid for'), 'there are three types of john: those who assume the women they buy have no human feelings; those who are conscious of a woman's humanity but choose to ignore it; and those who derive sexual pleasure from reducing the humanity of women they buy'.
Why does buying a prostitute's services "ignore [her] humanity"? Do you not "ignore the humanity" of any person you pay to perform any service? (had a deep and meaningful two-way spiritual connection with a bus driver or waitress lately?) Again, we come down to the question of what makes sex work so utterly different from all other forms of work. [Arguably, you can say I'm doing what I've accused you of doing, i.e. ignoring what a (former) prostitute has to say and claiming to speak for her. But that's one woman's experience, while I've read in a good variety of sources that prostitutes overwhelmingly oppose criminalization.]
In any case, there are a great many men for whom visiting prostitutes is not primarily, or not *at all*, about sex but instead about intimacy.
Edit: I should point out that I'm aware it's not currently illegal to buy or sell sex in the UK - but also that the illegality of 'brothels' (defined as two or more prostitutes working in one building) has safety implications, with respect to women being able to look out for each other, and that soliciting is also illegal. Prostitution is also legal in France, I think, but they have ludicrous laws against pimping that define it as anyone financially benefiting from someone else's sex work, to the extent that children being supported by a woman who earns a living through sex could in principle be charged with 'pimping' their own mother - although I don't know if a case that obviously crazy has ever come to court.