Navigating New Identity Politics

[American Dream]

I definitely agree and am not against meaningful reforms now, though I see this more in terms of workers' self-activity than carceral strategy.

It isn't a uniform, step by step process, is it though. It isn't impossible to work to abolish sex work before the rest of the project to abolish work in general 'catches up to it.'

[dada]

Yes, but as we see, the organizing of the pimp union is an unwanted side effect. Sex work is not only a worker issue, otherwise we'd just call sex work, 'work.'

If we're willing, until the system is dismantled, to use some aspects of it to help with the project of workers organization, why not use the deterrent power of threat of incarceration to help abolish sex work, if it works. Because that's the point of the strategy; whatever works. Where is the "ethical line" drawn when using the system to abolish the system.

[American Dream]

If I could snap my fingers and remove all laws against kidnapping, rape, coercion etc., I would not do it.

Would I spend a lot of time and energy organizing for new laws and new prisons? That would be a hard sell.

Pimps are parasites, as are most bosses and owners.

[dada]

See, reducing sex work to simply 'work,' leads to attempting to analyse it through the 'workers model' lens. Pimps become bosses and owners, which they are not. The model fails by taking into account the sex part of sex work, its most essential ingredient. Bosses and owners may be a specific type of parasite, but the pimp is of a different type, exploiting more that simply 'labor.'

This is the ever present danger of models, the ideological drift. Ideological purity cuts both ways.

[American Dream]

I do agree but it's not either/or. Sex work is work and the psychosexual part adds unique levels of trauma, exploitation and violation. All of that matters.

See, reducing sex work to simply 'work,' leads to attempting to analyse it through the 'workers model' lens. Pimps become bosses and owners, which they are not. The model fails by taking into account the sex part of sex work, its most essential ingredient. Bosses and owners may be a specific type of parasite, but the pimp is of a different type, exploiting more that simply 'labor.'

This is the ever present danger of models, the ideological drift. Ideological purity cuts both ways.

[dada]

Sure, we could even say that all exploitation is sexual exploitation in some sense. But where does this reductionist view lead. Saying "it's all sex" just removes sex from the equation, and we're right back where we started.

The analysis of sex work as work means seeing the sex worker as simply another commodified body. The sex worker isn't that at all, though. Sex work is the direct exploitation of sex, raw sex. Focusing on the work aspect of sex work skews the perspective, makes it seem more important than it is.

[American Dream]

Yeah, I agree with you dada, didn't mean to suggest otherwise. I still don't support carceral feminism as a worldview or strategy but I fundamentally agree with what you said.

[American Dream]

See for example:

Criminalising sex work won’t help victims of trafficking
Laws which target sex workers are supposedly set up to protect women. But really, they put vulnerable women in more danger.

By Stella Winter and Liliana Gashi from English Collective of Prostitutes
August 2, 2018


A rally for sex worker rights during the Women’s Strike, 8th March 2018. Photo by Juno Mac.


Laws criminalising clients have been introduced in a number of countries. Sweden is held up as the poster child for such laws yet evidence there shows that since the law change, sex workers face increased stigma, are more at risk of violence, and are less able to call on the protection of the police and the authorities.

After Ireland’s sex purchase law was introduced, reported incidences of violent crime against sex workers rose by almost 50%. In France, a two-year evaluation of the law found 42% of sex workers were more exposed to violence and 38% have found it increasingly hard to insist on condom use. In Norway, sex workers have faced evictions, prosecutions and increased stigma – with migrant workers particularly targeted.

None of this evidence was raised at the debate last week. Instead Champion alleged that prostitution (which she calls commercial sexual exploitation) is inherently violent: “Offering someone money, goods or services for sex is sexual coercion. It is a form of violence against women.” Like many before her, she used the spectre of trafficking to justify calling for a police crackdown. Gavin Shuker MP, the chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Prostitution, repeated his oft quoted claim that “the single driver of trafficking into this country is commercial sexual exploitation”

Champion is wrong when she says that the trafficking of women into the sex industry is happening on an “industrial scale”. A 2011 ESRC study of migrant sex workers found less than 6% had been trafficked, many said they prefer working in the sex industry rather than the “unrewarding and sometimes exploitative conditions they meet in non-sexual jobs”.

This is also reflected in our own experience organising for sex worker rights and safety. At the time when the police were repeating claims that “every single foreign woman in the ‘walk-up’ flats in Soho had been smuggled into the country and forced to work as a prostitute” we were holding meetings in the basement of a café, of over 60 women who worked in the area, to organise against raids and deportations. Women spoke out in Parliament, met the local vicar, and gave interviews to the press about how “being foreign doesn’t mean we are forced”.

As for Champion’s unsubstantiated claim that “sexual exploitation of women and girls by organised crime groups is widespread across the UK” We’ve heard that story before. As far back as 2002, Soho sex workers said that “All this talk of Balkan gangs running the Soho girls is rubbish. We are freelances, working for ourselves. Apart from what I need to live on, I send all my money back home.”

Through all the misinformation and sensationalist reporting about trafficking one stark truth emerges, despite millions of pounds of funding, victims of trafficking get little or no help from the authorities.

Some of the women in the English Collective of Prostitutes’ network would fit the description of a trafficked victim – that is someone who is brought to the UK, held against their will and threatened or coerced to provide sexual services for somebody else’s profit. In every case the women weren’t “saved” by others, they escaped through their own ingenuity, courage and organising skills.

Two sisters who came to London from rural Moldova, where the family had “no running water, or gas for heating”, were promised work in a restaurant. They told us how “after a week the men said we must earn our keep by sleeping with other men. They beat us and said we would never see each other again if we tried to leave.” They escaped by recruiting help from the receptionist in the flat where they worked, who squirrelled away some money. They both faked illness on the same day and ran. They refused to go to the police because they didn’t want to be sent back. We came to us instead and we found them emergency housing for a few days. Eventually one sister got a job as a stripper so they could afford a market rent.

We have at least 10 examples like that: the woman who cultivated a relationship with a bigger gangster than the one holding her, who supported her to get her passport back. The young woman who jumped out of a car at the petrol station and was sitting on our women’s centre doorstep when we arrived in the morning. We helped her claim asylum and she was detained for travelling on false documents. It was our campaigning with Black Women’s Rape Action Project that got her out.

Trafficking isn’t enabled by online adverts, it is enabled by poverty and women’s determination to escape it. And it is enabled by the hostile immigration environment that make it impossible for women to cross international borders unaided.

Once in the UK, sex work can be the best or only option to prevent destitution. Should the successive British and other governments which wage wars shattering and impoverishing countries and forcing people to flee, be put on trial for enabling trafficking? Should a government that created the hostile environment for immigrants (so graphically exposed by the Windrush scandal), which denies people access to housing, health care, a bank account and benefits, be put on trial for enabling exploitation? Should a government which introduces austerity policies 86% of which fall on women be prosecuted for sexism? We think yes.

Traffickers escape prosecution not because of a lack of applicable laws, but as with domestic violence and rape, because protecting women is not the priority. Women Against Rape points to the appalling 6% and 5% conviction rates for reported rape and domestic violence. More often than not when sex workers report violence, the police refuse to act and may even threaten to prosecute them instead for prostitution offences.

An effective anti-trafficking strategy has to strengthen women’s hands. Decriminalising sex work would enable women who work in the sex industry to insist on the same labour rights as other workers and report violence without fear of arrest. Ending the hostile immigration environment and ensuring that women have access to money and resources so that they can feed themselves and their families would make them less vulnerable to those ready to exploit them.

Excerpted from: https://www.redpepper.org.uk/criminalis ... ked-women/[

[Heaven Swan]

If you’ve been brainwashed American Dream, and lost your critical thinking skills, get help.

[dada]

Yes, I see. So is it possible to take what works best in both approaches, and put them to work together? We're human beings, sometimes they can be pretty clever. Taking what works best is just good strategy: whatever works.

Example: criminalize pimps and johns, while protecting basic rights for all.

Phasing out sex work being the basic direction worked towards, a goal. If we agree on that, then maybe we can all work together.

The argument that sex work pays better, we're robbing the sex worker of opportunity by putting a stop to it kind of falls flat. It may be true in the truthy sense, but is that really something that you want to argue for?

The individual stories pull on the heart strings, but of course we are dealing with a difficult issue here. Individual rights, overall societal impact. I think an article like this tries to make emotional appeal to make its case. And I feel playing emotional cards doesn't add to this debate in a productive way.

edited to add: I find it helps if I don't think of sex work as a problem to be solved, like there's some final solution to the sex work question. No amount of discouragement or deterrent, social pressure, carrots and sticks, will create a world where sex work is but a distant memory. People do what they want, if they want to bad enough. The idea, I think, is to take steps to contain the problem, maybe make it less of a problem, not eliminate it.

edited again to add:I should be clearer. The emotions raised by appeal are neutral, can be used to make the case for either side of the debate. The author of the article uses them in service to one side, weaponizes them. Then the article is posted here, using the weaponized emotion-infused contextual frame that the author gave it. However, weaponized emotions don't make a case for anything, really. They shut down intellectual discussion.

[conniption]

Oppression Obsession

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9_bI789Gog

Jonathan Pie
Published on Jun 29, 2018
The Trouble with Identity Politics.
5,040 Comments

[dada]

Might make more sense if the above youtube video were titled, "oppression obsession obsession." Guy cares enough to make a youtube video about something, must be pretty darn important to him, wouldn't you say.

Maybe he doesn't really care, I don't know. But if he doesn't then, what. Just jumping on a bandwagon to generate views? Guess I'm not seeing the point, here.

Meaning here, on RI. Where we look at the big picture, and the very, very small picture. All content aside, what's the point of the video from the RI perspective.

[Jerky]

If you’ve been brainwashed American Dream, and lost your critical thinking skills, get help.

To what, specifically, is this comment in reference too, HS?

Jerky

[Jerky]

Does anyone here REALLY think sex work is any more exploitative or damaging to the worker than, say, deep sea welding, crab fishing in Alaskan waters, coal mining in Black Long country, or even that most basic of laborers fall-backs, roofing?

Get real.

Sex is sex. Everybody does it. Hell, every animal on the planet above single cell self-replicators do it. It's the third most common thing for humans to do, after sleeping and eating/defecating. The fact that there's so much baggage attached to it is definitely a cultural hold-over from Victorian times (which were a lot more randy than we're led to believe, actually), and that fear/shame/loathing/control matrix type repression is more of a sign of a "sick" or disordered society than pornography or sex work will ever be.

J.

[dada]

Yes, old pal, but you're not the only person in the world. There are other people who disagree with you. We're looking for some common ground. I love sex, and I want to see it free, unleashed, as well.