prostitution

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
I also feel like noting here that despite one person in this thread already telling you that they have friends who have worked in the sex industry, you are continuing to repeatedly use a word that is now widely considered a slur.

http://titsandsass.com/the-p-word-101/ - here is an explanation as to why, if you need one

I use the word prostitute without any judgement. It's a word, any value judgements are independent of it.
 

UFO over easy

online mahjong
I don't buy the value judgement line when we're talking about words which describe communities of people who are systemically discriminated against, and which are readily used in order to propagate discrimination against them. And it's not like there's no alternative.

That website has an interesting article on the media conflation of trafficking as a legal term with people who have been forced into prostitution - http://titsandsass.com/sex-trafficking-a-media-guide/
 
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droid

Well-known member
It might also be useful if you clarified what you mean by 'abolition'? Cadging from wikipedia here but this seems reasonable - by these definitions, 'abolition' is what currently exists in the UK, whereas you seem to arguing for prohibition.

"Prostitution should be tolerated by society":

decriminalization: "prostitution is labor like any other. Sex industry premises should not be subject to any special regulation or laws", the current situation in New Zealand; the laws against operating a brothel, pimping and street prostitution are struck down, but prostitution is hardly regulated at all. Proponents of this view often cite instances of government regulation under legalization that they consider intrusive, demeaning, or violent, but feel that criminalization adversely affects sex workers.[81]

regulation: prostitution may be considered a legitimate business; prostitution and the employment of prostitutes are legal, but regulated; the current situation in the Netherlands, Germany, most of Australia and parts of Nevada (see Prostitution in Nevada). The degree of regulation varies very much, for example in Netherlands prostitutes are not required to undergo mandatory health checks (see Prostitution in the Netherlands) while in Nevada the regulations are very strict (see Prostitution in Nevada)

"Prostitution should not be tolerated":

abolitionism (prostitution itself is not prohibited, but most associated activities are illegal, in an attempt to make it more difficult to engage in prostitution, prostitution is heavily discouraged and seen as a social problem): prostitution (the exchange of sexual services for money) is legal, but the surrounding activities such as public solicitation, operating a brothel and other forms of pimping are prohibited, the current situation in Great Britain, France and Italy among others;

neo-abolitionism ("prostitution is a form of violence against women, it is a violation of human rights, the clients of the prostitutes exploit the prostitutes"): prostitutes are not prosecuted, but their clients and pimps are, which is the current situation in Sweden, Norway and Iceland (in Norway the law is even more strict, forbidding also having sex with a prostitute abroad).[82]

prohibitionism (both prostitutes and clients are criminalized and are seen as immoral, they are considered criminals): the prevailing attitude nearly everywhere in the United States, with a few exceptions in some rural Nevada counties (see Prostitution in Nevada)
 

droid

Well-known member
is it possible to implement them? now who's talking about a 'pipe dream'? Now who's being unrealistic?

Well yeah - you're talking about eliminating behaviour that has been around for as long as human civilisation and exists even in primates, whereas the suggestion in the article I linked to is that the decriminalisation could work if legislation is properly enacted and enforced.

I would suggest that there is an order of magnitude in difference between those two theories.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
It might also be useful if you clarified what you mean by 'abolition'? Cadging from wikipedia here but this seems reasonable - by these definitions, 'abolition' is what currently exists in the UK, whereas you seem to arguing for prohibition.

from that list it would be 'neo-abolitionism' - not a term I'm familiar with i must admit.

I have already said that I am not in favour of criminalising prostitutes, why are you asking me this again?
 

droid

Well-known member
lol indeed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_among_animals

A study at Yale–New Haven Hospital trains capuchin monkeys to use silver discs as money in order to study their economic behavior. The discs could be exchanged by the monkeys for various treats. During one chaotic incident, a researcher observed what appeared to be a monkey exchanging a disc for sex. The monkey that was paid for sex immediately traded the silver disc for a grape. The researcher took steps to prevent any possibility of coins being traded for sex after his suspicions were aroused
 
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droid

Well-known member
from that list it would be 'neo-abolitionism' - not a term I'm familiar with i must admit.

I have already said that I am not in favour of criminalising prostitutes, why are you asking me this again?

I was simply asking you to clarify your position. You said you wanted to 'abolish' prostitution. In the general meaning of the word this would equate to the prohibitionist position outlined above, whereas 'abolition', in this context, means something different.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
I was simply asking you to clarify your position. You said you wanted to 'abolish' prostitution. In the general meaning of the word this would equate to the prohibitionist position outlined above, whereas 'abolition', in this context, means something different.

well, now you know.
 

droid

Well-known member
And if I might add, as someone with no particular horse in this race, the handbaggery from everyone here is making this a less constructive exercise than it might be.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
No, abolitionists (at least the kind that I support) do not believe in criminalizing women. Quite the opposite, they are concerned with liberation of prostitutes from slavery. They oppose legalization and decriminalisation for the reasons I've outlined above.

from the 1st page,

like i say i've never come across the term 'neo-abolitionism'. sorry if it caused any confusion.
 

droid

Well-known member
Just to go back to the moral argument for a moment, as I think it goes to root of the stances on this.

So we have two basic positions:

  1. Sex is the ultimate form of human communion, (perhaps even) something sacred, the human body is not just another commodity, and the selling of sex is an affront to human dignity.
  2. Sex is just another biological function like eating or shitting and if people wish to sell sex of their own free will then it's nobody else's business and any attempt to prevent this is a paternalistic attempt to control women's bodies.

Seems to me that both of these things are true, and possibly both of them are sometimes true at the same time.

Like I alluded to earlier, my position on pretty much all issues involving sexuality is essentially 'as long as there is consent and no-one is being harmed, its none of my business', but despite this there's something here that trips me up, which I suppose puts me closer to the first position personally - that the idea of buying sex has always seemed intrinsically wrong to me and its something I never have, nor will I (hopefully) ever do.

So, a question for those advocating decriminalisation.

Whatever about the morals of selling sex - do you think its moral for a man to buy sex?
 
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droid

Well-known member
Not trying to catch anyone out or stir any shit here btw. This seems to me to be a particularly messy question, and Im intrigued by the seeming certainty, the lack of doubt in the two positions being argued for here.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
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.
 
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