Prostitution - whose choice is it?

[American Dream]

Sex work: Solidarity not salvation

An article by an Australian Wobbly sex worker advocating solidarity and syndicalism. Orginally published in the Autumn issue of Direct Action, the newspaper of the Australian IWW. Reprinted in issue #1745, May 2012, of the IWW's newspaper Industrial Worker.

An ongoing debate is taking place in anarchist and feminist circles on the legitimacy of sex work and the rights of sex workers. The two main schools of thought are almost at polar opposites of each other. On the one side you have the abolitionist approach led by feminists, such as Melissa Farley who maintains that sex work is a form of violence against women. Farley has said that “If we view prostitution as violence against women, it makes no sense to legalize or decriminalize prostitution.” On the other side you have sex worker rights activists who view sex work as being much closer to work in general than most realize, who believe that the best way forward for sex workers is in the fight for workers’ rights and social acceptance and for activists to listen to what sex workers have to say. In this article I will discuss why the abolitionist approach discriminates against sex workers and takes advantage of their marginalized status, while the rights approach offer the opportunity to make solid differences in the labor rights and human rights of sex workers.

An example of the kind of arguments put forward by advocates of abolitionism runs as follows:

“The concept of women’s ‘choice’ to sell sex is constructed in line with neoliberal and free-market thinking; the same school of thinking that purports that workers have real ‘choices’ and control over their work. It suggests that women choose to sell sex and we should therefore focus on issues to do with sex workers’ safety, ability to earn money, and persecution by the state. Whilst women’s safety and women’s rights are paramount, the argument for state-regulated brothels and unionization is reformist at best, naive and regressive at worst. Even the proposal for ‘collective brothels’ ignores the gendered nature of prostitution, and its function in supporting male domination.

“An anarchist response should demand the eradication of all exploitative practices and not suggest they can be made safer or better.

”(Taken from a leaflet handed out by abolitionists at the sex work workshop at the 2011 London Anarchist Bookfair.)

A Wobbly approach does call for the eradication of all exploitative practices, not just those that benefit the one advocating for change or that one finds particularly distasteful. Work under capitalism is exploitive, you are either exploited or live off the exploitation of others—most of us do both. Sex under capitalism and patriarchy is all too often commodified and used as a means of exploitation. Work and sex in and of themselves are none of these things. Fighting sex work instead of fighting capitalism and patriarchy does not address the exploitation in its entirety. To focus on the gendered nature of sex work will not change the gendered society we live in; if anything it reinforces the myth that the gender divide is a natural part of life that must be worked around. It also silences the sex workers who do not fit the gendered notions of the female sex worker, a group who are all too conveniently ignored whenever they challenge the abolitionist discourse on sex work.

Abolitionists have accused any approach other than theirs’ as being fundamentally reformist and thus not in line with the principles of anarchism. However, isn’t trying to end an industry because the overarching capitalist, patriarchal system of our times feeds into it, rather than fighting for the emancipation of all workers, in itself reformist?

The anthropologist Laura Agustin contends that the abolitionist movement took up strength at a time when the theories of welfarism were gaining popularity among the middle class who felt they had a duty to better the working class (without addressing the legitimacy of the class system as a whole). Middle-class women, in particular, found an outlet from their own gender oppression, by positioning themselves as the “benevolent saviors” of the “fallen,” thus gaining positions and recognition in the male-dominated public sphere that they never previously could have attained.

There are more than a few remnants of the middle class, almost missionary, desire to “save” by implanting one’s own moral outlook on the “fallen” in today’s abolitionist movement. Not only does it give people a way to feel as if they are rescuing those most in need, but it does so without requiring them (in most instances) to question their own actions and privileges. The sight of someone dressed in sweatshop-manufactured garments with an iPhone, iPad and countless other gadgets made in appalling conditions calling for the abolition of the sex industry never ceases to confound me. It must be one of the few industries that people are calling for the destruction of because of the worst elements within it. They may recognize that the treatment of workers in Apple factories amounts to slavery, and that the instances of rape and sexual assault of garment makers in some factories amount to sexual slavery, but they contend that abolition of either industry is not desirable, that mass-produced clothing and technology, unlike sex, are essentials to our modern lives. Essential to whom I may ask? To the workers making such products? They do not use the products that they slave away producing, they do not benefit from their employment anymore than a sex worker in their country does theirs. It seems the essentiality of a product is judged through the lens of the consumer, not the worker, despite this being something the abolitionist accuses only opponents of abolition of doing. Calling for the abolition of sex work remains, largely, a way for people to position themselves in a seemingly selfless role without having to do the hard work of questioning their own social privilege. This is a fundamentally welfarist and reformist position to take.

Is sex (or the ability to engage in it if you so wish) not as essential to life or at least to happiness and health as any of the above are? Sex is a big part of life, a part that people should be free to take pleasure in and engage in, not a part that is viewed as being bad and dirty and shameful. I am not saying that anyone should be obligated to provide sex for someone else unless they want to, but pointing out that trying to justify abolishing the sex industry with the argument that sex isn’t essential when there are so many industries that produce things we don’t need is incredibly weak. It also, again, focuses more on the consumer than the worker. Instead of focusing on what the sex worker thinks about their work, how important it is, how it makes them feel, we are told to focus on the fact that they consumer doesn’t really need it. The worker is reduced to no more than an object, an object that needs saving whether they want it or not.

Can no worker take pleasure in aspects of their work despite capitalism? Can no woman take pleasure in sex despite patriarchy? If the answer is that they can, then why is it so hard to believe that there are sex workers who choose and/or take pleasure in their work despite capitalism and patriarchy, not because of them? I have been told by abolitionists that this is not possible within the sex industry, that any worker who enjoys their job, or even those who do not enjoy but see it as a better opportunity than anything else available to them, only does so out of internalized misogyny. That if they were freed from this, by adopting an abolitionist mindset (any other stance is accused of being founded on internalized misogyny and therefore invalid) they would see the truth. It sounds an awful lot like religious dogma and is often treated with as much zeal. The abolitionist approach refuses to value or even acknowledge the intelligence, agency, experiences and knowledge of sex workers. This is discrimination posing as feminism. If you want equality for women then you need to listen to all women, not just the ones who say what you want to hear.

Abolitionists seem to view sex workers who do not agree with them as being too brainwashed by patriarchy to advocate for themselves, or that these specific sex workers are not representative of the experiences of the majority of sex workers. As an anarchist I view all work under capitalism to be exploitative, and that sex work is no exception. I do not believe however that work that involves sex is necessarily more exploitative or damaging than other forms of wage slavery. This is not to say that there are not terrible violations of workers’ rights within the sex industry; there are and they are violations I want to fight to overcome. (By acknowledging these violations I am not saying that there are not wonderful experiences between workers and between workers and clients as well.)

If one is serious about respecting and advocating for the rights of sex workers then we have to look at what methods work. We do not live in some anarchist utopia where no one is forced to work in jobs they wouldn’t otherwise do in order to get by, so I do not see the point in spending energy debating whether sex work would exist in an anarchist society and what it would look like, if it starts to cut in to energy that could be spent advocating for the rights of sex workers in the here and now.

Abolitionists have often complained of rights activists using language to legitimize the industry by using terms like “client” instead of “john” and “worker” instead of “prostitute.” Sex workers and rights activists have moved away from the old terms as they are terms that have often been used to disempower and discriminate against workers, whereas “client” and “sex worker” are much more value neutral. Abolitionists are not innocent of using language to further their agenda. Often the term “prostitute” is used to describe sex workers. This positions the worker as an agency-less victim. Once you have positioned someone as being without agency it becomes easier to ignore their voice, to believe that you know what is in their best interest and that you are doing, or advocating, for them.

Another accusation made against rights activists is that they put the client’s wants before the needs and safety of the worker, or that they attempt to legitimize commercial sexual exchanges (something that is not considered a legitimate service by abolitionists). I have not found this to be the case—the majority of rights activists are or have been sex workers, or have close ties to sex workers, and their primary focus is on the rights, needs and safety of sex workers. For instance, Scarlet Alliance, the national sex worker advocacy body, is made up of current and former sex workers. People who would have an interest in worker exploitation, such as employers, are not eligible to join.

That they do not focus on labeling clients (the clientele are too diverse to paint with the one label anyway) is no reflection on how important the needs and safety of sex workers are. In fact it is because they are paramount to the rights movement that the focus is not on making moral judgments on the clients and is instead on labor organizing and worker advocacy. To ignore the vast amounts of change that can be made by workers organizing and advocating together in favor of moralizing over the reasons why the industry exists and whether it is an essential service is to sacrifice the rights and well-being of workers for theoretical gains.

At the end of the day the abolitionist is using their power and social privilege to take advantage of sex workers’ marginalized position, something that they accuse clients of doing. The difference is that they are not seeking sexual but moral gratification. The abolitionist approach does not help sex workers, nor does it empower them. Rather, this approach gives them a role, and penalizes them if they refuse to play it. The sex worker rights approach works in the same way that all workers rights and anti-discrimination movements have worked by empowerment, support and solidarity.

There is no anti-capitalist blueprint as to how to best eradicate exploitation, but rather several schools of thought, often their own internal schools, as to how to reach a free society. I believe that when it comes to eradicating exploitation in the workplace, syndicalism is the approach that best suits the fight at hand. When the workplace is that of a brothel, strip club, street corner, motel room, etc., the fundamentals of the fight are no different from that of other wage slaves. Sex workers need to be able to unionize, as yet there is no sex workers union. While I would love for there to be a sex workers union, I also think the belief that all workers are equal, that we are all wage slaves, that we are all in this fight together and that it is the bosses who are the enemy, make the IWW an ideal union for the marginalized workers who fall through the cracks of the existing trade unions. That said it really is the ideal union for all workers. Actions such as joining the IWW and using the strength of a union, rather than just one’s lone voice, to advocate for change is one way in which sex workers can fight their battle. Another is joining Scarlet Alliance, the national, peak sex worker organization in Australia. Like the IWW, bosses are not able to join, meaning that the interests of Scarlet Alliance are solely the interests of the workers, not those of the bosses or the abolitionists. It is actions like this, actions that empower sex workers, that we need to fight the discrimination and marginalization that exists.

If activists are truly serious about the rights of sex workers they will listen to us even if what we have to say is difficult to hear and they will support us even if they don’t like what we do. It is only when all workers join together that we have the power fight capitalism and the bosses. We do not ask for salvation but for solidarity.

[brekin]

Consciousness raising (also called awareness raising) is a form of activism, popularized by United States feminists in the late 1960s. It often takes the form of a group of people attempting to focus the attention of a wider group of people on some cause or condition.

Heaven Swan wrote:

Not sure where you got that paragraph Brekin, but it's incorrect.

I got it from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_raising

I just think this illustrates and harks back to when I was babbling about the General Semantics orders of knowing. I'm sure you believe your definition of consciousness raising is correct by your experiences, just as I do from mine. But that may be generational, regional, etc. basically our personal experience of the term. My guess is consciousness raising began as you describe and as the movement got bigger morphed into what I believe it to be now. As there are a lot of people who probably have a definition close to mine and yours, which is "correct" then? I could say mine because Wikipedia is used as a resource of record by millions, but I'm sure the term has been appropriated to some degree and those who were using it in the 60's (who themselves probably borrowed it from elsewhere) would probably say it has been modified. Again, who is "correct", when words change their meanings slightly by the season and everyone has their own tailored version?

The same goes for "prostitution". This triggers a myriad of responses and experiences from people based on their experience with the term, which umbrellas huge areas of experience, when we say Prostitution, we are really saying a short hand version of: "My understanding of Prostitution based on my experience", which we've seen differs widely. Some people take it at face value that their definition implies it is a freely entered in exchange between two capable, consenting adults. While others take it for face value that one parties hand is forced mostly, and is hardly consenting or capable when you take in numerous other factors. So we have Prostitution1 and Prostitution2, and so on 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,... I just don't see how much headway can be made when people use their own definition, even if they agree about other definitions, when they talk about such a volatile topic that will inadvertently step on other peoples favorite definitions. In this arena I'd defer to those who have first hand experience dealing with prostitution from whatever angle. But again, that is just one person's experienced definition, no matter how informed, and could vary widely with Prostitution as it is experienced overall globally for most.

Heaven Swan wrote:

And by saying "How would you know?" (About consciousness raising), I simply meant that you would not have had the opportunity to participate in feminist consciousness raising. There was no put down implied.
Another movement that uses sharing personal experience is AA and 12 step programs but the goal is to heal and evolve individually and become aware of personal addictive patterns.

Thank you, and sorry I got twitchy. This again I think stems from our different definitions of the term. No, by your definition, I wasn't having coffee over Gloria Steinem's house in the 60's discussing opportunities for women. But by my definition, I have been exposed to and had my attention drawn, repeatedly, to feminist concerns from numerous 2nd and 3rd wave feminists.

Heaven Swan wrote:

All I'm saying is that I enjoy, learn and evolve from hearing peoples experiences on message forums such as this.

Ditto. And peace.

[Nordic]

Brekin:

And really, the majority of RI posters (I'm going to guess) are easy prey for this because they are probably (guessing again) pastey white, males, with well meaning concepts of progressiveness matched with fears of elite class conspiracy laden worldviews. So, while in actuality they probably have little power or influence over anyone other than their small circle of intimates, in theory they could belong to the same cabal running the world if they had gone to a different boarding school.

Wow. Quote of the day.

I often wonder about these very things. As in how closely do I fit that very description and how I might be different had my circumstances been different. It's a great unknowable.

[Project Willow]

The main point is about exploitation. If, by my freely chosen actions (sex work in this case), I am contributing to a world in which that freely chosen activity gets returned against me and others (women in this case, mostly) in ways I can't foresee or don't experience as directly connected to it (like sexism, gendered violence, mediated and non-mediated objectifications, etc), then my sex work labor is being turned into an alien force and contributing to the creation of a more hostile, misogynistic world. All of this happens whether or not I have a subjective experience of being exploited in or alienated from my sex work.

Absolutely beautifully put, thank you.

I am alone in my abolitionist leanings among some of the people I most respect and love in this world. They favor decriminalization, and invariably their reasons are it won't go away, and women in the trade must be afforded protection under the law. I certainly agree with the latter, and I don't know of anyone engaged in this debate who doesn't.

However, there are serious problems with full decriminalization or legalization, demand and trafficking increase.

The scale effect of legalized prostitution leads to an expansion of the prostitution market, increasing human trafficking, while the substitution effect reduces demand for trafficked women as legal prostitutes are favored over trafficked ones. Our empirical analysis for a cross-section of up to 150 countries shows that the scale effect dominates the substitution effect. On average, countries where prostitution is legal experience larger reported human trafficking inflows.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1986065

Using two recent sources of European cross country data we show that trafficking of persons for commercial sexual exploitation (as proxied by the data sets we are using) is least prevalent in countries where prostitution is illegal, most prevalent in countries where prostitution is legalized, and in between in those countries where prostitution is legal but procuring illegal. Case studies of two countries (Norway and Sweden) that have criminalized buying sex support the possibility of a causal link from harsher prostitution laws to reduced trafficking.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10657-011-9232-0

I have not yet seen a policy I favor, though the Nordic model is as close as any at this point. I also found this paper which used a strict economic analysis to propose a hybrid that may satisfy the tiny minority of women who do choose and claim to be happy with the work. In this model, procurement of services from unlicensed sex workers is criminalized:
http://web-docs.stern.nyu.edu/old_web/economics/docs/workingpapers/2012/NEWLeePersson_HumanTraffickingandRegulatingProstitution.pdf

I don't see any great solutions at this point, but I cannot support full decriminalization for a variety of reasons, including my belief that the practice is inherently damaging to individuals engaged in prostitution (sex work is too broad a category to address here), in all but the most ideal circumstances. This has nothing to do with morality, but with biology, an idea I'll flesh out at some point in another post.

[Project Willow]

Chris Hedges interviews prostitution survivor Rachel Moran

Moran, "The three main skills of prostituted women: the ability to resist the urge to vomit, the ability to cry, and the ability to divorce yourself from your current reality." (hint: dissociation)



https://youtu.be/-HOfslBcUOE

Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00TG24BDK/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1

[parel]

Chris Hedges is already on the coat for some shit he wrote two years ago. I can't even remember what it was, but it was dog whistle stuff that stigmatised sex workers badly. He's an ugly mug. Despite being good on other things like surveillance and such, he can well and truly fuck off. I place him now in the same category as Kristoff. Warmonger for the soft war on women.

Rachel Moran works for Ruhama, an anti-trafficking organisation that was formerly Magdalene Laundries, a catholic slave camp in Ireland for sex workers, loose women & unwed mothers that operated up until only recently, 70s to 90s, can't remember exactly. Babies taken from their mothers fostered out to catholic families in Ireland, the US & elsewhere. Several hundred women died there, some lived and worked there their whole lives. Plus Moran's hawking a new book about some shit. Rebecca Motts & Rachel Moran's material belong in a thread about trafficking, not sex work or rape.

Funny how so many high profile "exited" women identify as "high class".

It's such a red light to me.

[brekin]

parel wrote:

Rachel Moran works for Ruhama, an anti-trafficking organisation that was formerly Magdalene Laundries, a catholic slave camp in Ireland for sex workers, loose women & unwed mothers that operated up until only recently, 70s to 90s, can't remember exactly. Babies taken from their mothers fostered out to catholic families in Ireland, the US & elsewhere. Several hundred women died there, some lived and worked there their whole lives. Plus Moran's hawking a new book about some shit. Rebecca Motts & Rachel Moran's material belong in a thread about trafficking, not sex work or rape.

There was a good film that came out about this, The Magdalene Sisters. I remember it was pretty compelling, and crazy making why and what some/most of the women went through there.

[American Dream]

This is, to me, a really important perspective:

Sex Work Against Work

Morgane Merteuil October 31, 2015




While in Anglophone countries the term “sex work” has become quite common, there has been a relative reluctance to discuss it among Francophone intellectuals and activists. Whether among “prohibitionists,” who argue that prostitution can be neither a profession nor work but simply violence, a damage to women’s dignity (as if these two terms were mutually exclusive), or among those who oppose this prohibition yet maintain a kind of “skepticism towards the claim for a recognition of ‘sex work,’” such as Lilian Mathieu, the refusal to speak about sex work is in fact symptomatic of the difficulties that feminists and the left continue to face when discussing women’s labor.1

Even if the topic of sex work might be enjoying growing interest in some parts of the world, the political challenges are by no means new. In the 1970s for example, when a number of feminist collectives launched the “wages for housework” campaign a large part of the left and even of the feminist movement remained hostile to this demand.2 Far from being only a programmatic demand, however, Wages for Housework was instead an invitation; an invitation to radically put not only the whole capitalism system into question, to the extent that capital benefited from the unwaged reproductive work carried out by women, but also the nuclear family itself, in so far as it represents one of the primary places where this exploitation occurs.

Although the Wages for Housework campaign was launched at the very beginning of the 1970s, it was not until 1978 that Carol Leigh, an American sex worker and feminist activist, coined the term “sex work.” And if the claim for “Wages for Housework” might not have the same relevance today now that a large part of domestic work has been commodified – former housewives who have entered the labor market have partly delegated this work to poorer women, especially migrant women – the claim that “sex work is work,” considering the active and often heated discussions it generates, seems more important than ever in our contemporary moment.

Therefore, while certainly taking into account the evolutions in the configuration of the reproductive sector, I will show how “sex work is work” aligns with the struggles for “a wage for housework”; in other words, we will aim to better discern and outline the mutual stakes of the housewives’ struggles and those of sex workers, so as to reaffirm the necessary solidarity between women and the inseparable character of feminist and anti-capitalist struggles. This will allow us to better grasp the relations between sex work and capitalism, and thus reaffirm the need, especially for the left and for feminism, to support these struggles in the name of the revolutionary process they open on to.

Sex Work as Reproductive Work

There are many reasons why we can insist on the kinship between the Wages for Housework movement and those struggles unfolding today that claim “sex work is work.”

First, each of these struggles emerged out of the formidable mobilizations of the feminist movement, which took place on the theoretical terrain as much as the practical one. If the Wages for Housework movement’s affiliation with feminism has always appeared evident, this has not been the same for the sex workers’ movement. We should recall that it was during a feminist conference that Carol Leigh first felt the need to speak about “sex work.”3 We can also note that, according to Silvia Federici, the feminist movement not only allowed the concept of sex work to emerge, but feminism may have also played a role in increasing the overall number of women engaged in sex work:

I think that to some extent, […] but […] to a limited extent, that the increase in the number of women who are turning to sex work has also had to do with the feminist movement. It has given a contribution to undermining that kind of moral stigma attached to sex work. I think the women’s movement has also given power, for example, to prostitutes to represent themselves a sex workers.

It’s not an accident that in the wake of feminist movement you have the beginning of a sex worker’s movement, throughout Europe, for instance. So that the stigma, the feminists, they really attacked that hypocrisy: the holy mother, that vision of women, the whole self-sacrificial, and the prostitute, which is the woman who does sexual work but for money.4

Federici’s definition of the prostitute as “the woman who does sexual work, but for money” points to yet another reason why it is legitimate to connect the struggles of housewives to that of sex workers: since work can exist even where there is no money, sex work is not solely a prerogative of professional sex workers.

One of the main contributions of feminist theorists, especially Marxist-feminists, was to show that just because an activity is not waged does not mean that it is not functional work relating to capitalism. In other words, it is not because an exchange appears to be free that it escapes from capitalist dynamics – much to the contrary. By analyzing “the history of capitalism from the viewpoint of women and reproduction,”5Marxist-feminist theorists such as Federici have shown that domestic work performed by women – voluntarily inasmuch as it is considered to be what they naturally to do out of love – serves, beyond those who directly benefit from it – workers, future workers, or former workers – the interests of the capitalists, who consequently do not need to take into account the cost for this reproduction in the value of the labor-power they buy.

Beginning with ourselves as women, we know that the working day for capital does not necessarily produce a paycheck, it does not begin and end at the factory gates, and we rediscover the nature and extent of house- work itself. For as soon as we raise our heads from the socks we mend and the meals we cook and look at the totality of our working day, we see that while it does not result in a wage for ourselves, we nevertheless produce the most precious product to appear on the capitalist market: labor power.6

The diverse activities women perform at home – such as looking after the children, preparing meals for the men who come back from their day at work, or providing care for the elderly or ill – count as work that, although it may not not produce commodities in the same way the proletarian laborer does in the factory, nevertheless produces and reproduces what is necessary, indeed, “most precious,” to capitalists: the labor-power that a capitalist buys from the worker. According to this approach, there is no fundamental difference between ironing, cooking, and sex from the perspective of their functions in the capitalist mode of production – all of these activities relate to the more general category of reproductive work. Silvia Federici and Nicole Cox continue:

Housework is much more than house cleaning. It is servicing the wage earners physically, emotionally, sexually, getting them ready for work day after day. It is taking care of our children—the future workers—assisting them from birth through their school years, ensuring that they too perform in the ways expected of them under capitalism. This means that behind every factory, behind every school, behind every office or mine there is the hidden work of millions of women who have consumed their life, their labor, producing the labor power that works in those factories, schools, offices, or mines.7

And while some may think that sex now appears less and less as a service provided by a woman to her spouse after so-called “sexual liberation,” itself led by feminism, that “liberation” in fact only further burdens women:

Sexual freedom does not help. Certainly it is important that we are not stoned to death if we are “unfaithful,” or if it is found that we are not “virgins.” But “sexual liberation” has intensified our work. In the past, we were just expected to raise children. Now we are expected to have a waged job, still clean the house and have children and, at the end of a double workday, be ready to hop in bed and be sexually enticing. For women the right to have sex is the duty to have sex and to enjoy it (something which is not expected of most jobs), which is why there have been so many investigations, in recent years, concerning which parts of our body—whether the vagina or the clitoris—are more sexually productive.8

Finally, it should be noted that while Silvia Federici mostly refers to the heterosexual nuclear family, she does not see any end to the function of sex as work through homosexuality:

Homosexuality and heterosexuality are both working conditions…but homosexuality is workers’ control of production, not the end of work.9

This approach to sex, which treats it as an integral part of reproductive labor, allows us to reject the idea that there is some fundamental distinction between so-called “free sex,” as performed within the couple, and what we today call sex work, prostitution.

Or as in Leopoldina Fortunati’s puts it, “the family and prostitution are the main sectors, the backbone of the entire process [of reproduction]”:

Within the two main sectors, the fundamental labor processes are: (1) the process of production and reproduction of labor power and (2) the specifically sexual reproduction of male labor power. This is not to say that the family does not include the sexual reproduction of male labor power, but (despite often being posited as central) it is in fact only one of the many “jobs” that housework entails.10

From this point, Fortunati obliges us to think of the family and prostitution not as opposed institutions, but rather complementary ones: “its function [of prostitution] must be to support and complement housework.”11

This approach to prostitution in terms of reproductive labor allows us not only to highlight a common condition of women – beyond the division between the mother and the whore, since even if one performs it freely, while the other explicitly asks for money, for both, sex is work – but above all allows us to better understand the position of the sex industry in the capitalist system. Whereas most contemporary theories are essentially interested in capitalist dynamics in the sex industry through an analysis of the relations of production and exploitation between sex workers and their bosses/pimps and/or their clients, this perspective invites us to ultimately consider these two figures as only intermediary forms of the exploitation which benefits, in the last analysis, capital. It then becomes necessary to stop interpreting the criminalization of sex workers exclusively as sexual repression (with evident gendered and racist dynamics) and begin to see it as a kind of repression that fundamentally serves specific economic interests which are secured through sex, class and gender dynamics.

Continues at: https://viewpointmag.com/2015/10/31/sex ... inst-work/

[Nordic]

Regarding my former close female friend who I described earlier, when she finally did speak to me about her sidebar experiences -- and it took years -- her voice would literally change when she would talk about it. It would get lower, quieter, and turn into a near mono-tone. It was like she could only talk about it while deliberately removing all emotion from her speech. She started by working at strip clubs when she was in her late teens and her mother was suddenly institutionalized.

Willow, I've been very curious as to anything you say regarding this subject as my respect and affection for you is immense. I truly hope nothing I've said has offended you. My take on this subject is based on the idea of people treating one other with empathy and respect. Which is probably a fantasy here. At least in all cases. I know that a good many men are actually sweethearts but too many of them aren't, and some of them are monsters.

I was shooting in a very high end hotel in a high-end part of LA not too long ago -- and in the bar/lounge area I could see what was clearly a John/hooker situation with a much older guy and s younger pretty hot woman in a tight short dress. The man was just talking. Talking and talking while occasionally stroking her leg. I engaged a hotel employee about the situation and he told me that they just have to look the other way, there's little they can do to stop it, and told me some rather amusing stories about some of the regular guys who use the hotel for that when they're in town. All just harmless weird stuff, like a guy who would set up elaborate decorations in the room and leave a lot of them up when he left for the hotel people to just throw away. Christmas lights and drapes and stuff.

Anyway ...

[parel]

I want to add a bit about I cannot tolerate anti-trafficking rhetoric. Apart from the disempowering language they employ to try to conflate sex work with rape and trafficking, it is gratuitous shock-pornography, like the "thousand dicks a day" meme that circulated in this thread for a while. I question the validity of some of these narratives, certianly in the cases of Mott and Moran, and do not want to be subjected to fabricated stories that are so intricate in their descriptions of violent sex, that it becomes an unacceptable distraction from the issue we are discussing. Mott and Moran's material regularly bomb discussions like this with abolitionists gleefully planting them as if to say "gotcha". Now, I'm not afraid to take either of them. In fact, I would like to interrogate both those women separately about their stories because both of them are definitely leaving something out. But I won't cower to their well-paid narratives and I'm not afraid to criticise them.

I started this to actually put forth something about myself (before later thinking, it is not safe here -- too many abolitionists who will happily jump into bed with law enforcement and who think it's entirely acceptable to sic the cops onto other women in the name of feminism) but also to hear real perspectives from other people.

Since i deleted my own posts anyway, I'm happy to start another thread and repost what I wrote and leave this thread to the anti-trafficking crowd. This can be home to the likes of Chris Hedges and his pity porn patrol.

This can be an anti-trafficking thread.

Clean slate.

[jakell]

I'm pleased that someone other than me has noticed that particular meme creation and insertion, subtexts like this tend to get initially overlooked and then, someone starts to run with it.

You do seem to have inadvertently given it a very catchy name though.

[Heaven Swan]

Parel wrote:

So now I do full time activism, which pays badly but is more rewarding because it is helping to build a movement and assisting sex workers who are not as privileged as I ever was. even at my lowest.

Who pays for your pro-prostitution activism Parel? And you're located in Thailand no less, one of the main hubs of sex trafficking and sex tourism.

Do these struggling and extremely poor girls, boys, women and men really need help in defending their right to prostitute themselves, or might they better benefit with and improved economy, dignified jobs that don't involve selling access to internal organs and exposing theirselves to AIDS, etc, trauma therapy and support?

I'd also like some proof or a citation for your accusations that Rachel Moran (BTW thanks for posting that video PW it was incredibly moving) and Rebecca Mott are being paid by so and so. I mean are we just supposed to believe wild accusations and insults that you seem to invent on the spot?

You say that Rachel Moran claims to have been 'high class'. If you watch the video you'll see that she began at age 15 as a street prostitute in Ireland and later worked in indoor prostitution as well. She also says that if she were forced in some way to prostitute herself again she would easily choose street prostitution over indoors, because on the street you can use your senses to assess the sex buyer, and if you get maniac psycho killer vibes you can walk away, whereas if a rich psycho pays a lot of money for you through an intermediary, there isn't the space to vibe him out for danger and reject him.

My first exposure to Rachel Moran was the above video but I know that Rebecca Mott is scraping by on donations to her blog and the like, which BTW I have donated to. Rachel Moran obviously has income from her book and if she is paid by some legit NGO I have no problem with that, but I do have a big problem with sex industry barons funding 'sex worker activism.'

[Heaven Swan]

From the amazing blog of Jonah Mix, a leftist male who truly and masterfully supports women in our fight against the global pandemic of male violence against us and our quest to gain status as full human beings.

http://jonahmix.com/2015/05/16/abolition-or-legalization-which-approach-to-prostitution-is-truly-utopian/

Abolition or Legalization – Which Approach to Prostitution is Truly Utopian?




Supporters of the sex industry are quick to slander prostitution abolition, calling it prudish, conservative, racist, oppressive, man-hating, anti-sex, and utopian – among other loaded and inaccurate terms. There are quite a few great resources out there for why these claims are baseless misogyny, but I wanted to take a moment to focus on that last accusation. I recently had a long and exhausting Twitter conversation with a sex buying man who repeatedly fell back on the claim that prostitution was inevitable and that all efforts to abolish it were doomed. Instead, he argued, it should be legalized and regulated. Considering that this is a common argument, I thought I’d try and do a brief analysis of why it fails and, more importantly, why the logic of inevitability is fundamentally flawed.

First, it’s worth noting that many of the men who argue that prostitution cannot be abolished are also quick to portray the industry as safe, profitable, fun, and even empowering – which makes me wonder why would they need the inevitability defense in the first place. If you truly believe that something is a social good, it seems unnecessary to justify it further by saying it could not possibly be done away with. We don’t feel the need to highlight the “inevitability” of things we all agree are ethically sound; no one ends a talk about the social and personal benefits of giving to charity by saying, “And c’mon, people have been giving to charity for thousands of years, there’s no way to stop it.”

On the reverse, it makes even less sense to play up the positive aspects of a system that you truly believe literally cannot not exist. If reference to the inevitability of righteous systems seems unnecessary, reference to the righteousness of inevitable systems is downright incoherent. If prostitution is just going to happen – if it’s a force of nature driven by innate biological factors encoded into our very essence – then why does it even matter whether or not it’s a positive experience for women? If men paying to fuck female strangers is a universal pre-existing feature of human existence, then any statement about its moral value seems about as meaningful as an ethical examination of hurricanes or malaria.

When a man says that prostitution is both empowering and inevitable, he is essentially saying, “You enjoy fucking me for money, but even if you didn’t, I wouldn’t stop.” It’s a clever move, really – it allows him to hide behind a convenient veneer of consent without actually pinning his access to female bodies on anything other than institutional male power. In that way, the coupling of “Prostitution is a safe and rewarding career” and “Prostitution will never, ever go away” carries a tone similar to the classic abuser’s refrain: Our relationship is great, nothing is wrong, and if you try to leave, I’ll kill you.

This pattern has played out many times in history. Child labor, slavery, and the fourteen-hour work day were all at one time portrayed by the powerful as good for society; the moment resistance on the part of the oppressed revealed that bourgeois mythology for what it was, the justification similarly shifted to inevitability. And in each case, that justification failed as well. We now know that neither the ownership of human beings nor the exploitation of children is necessary for a flourishing society, and soon we will realize the same about the sale of women’s bodies.

Adopting the Nordic model in Norway has reduced street prostitution by up to 60% and even reduced indoor prostitution by at least a tenth. Sweden shows similar results. While human trafficking rises in countries like Germany and New Zealand that have legalized pimping, it is dropping in Nordic Model countries. Men in Sweden show measurably higher levels of disapproval towards purchasing sex and are, by many accounts, the least likely population on the planet to do so. Even South Korea, which has only adopted an incomplete (and problematic) version of the Nordic Model, has seen its massive sex industry almost halved. When these statistics are combined with historical examples of prostitution abolition in Cuba and Maoist China – not to mention thousands of precolonial prostitution-free indigenous cultures – the practice of men purchasing women looks less and less inevitable every day.

Prostitution abolition is not utopian. What is utopian is the false hope that a sex industry can exist without rampant, institutionalized abuse. The roots of male violence against prostituted women and the roots of prostitution itself spring from the same poisoned soil of objectification, callousness, and the dead-eyed eroticism of masculinity. That is the true irony here; for all their claims that radical feminists are unrealistic in their goals, those who advocate for legalization and regulation have as their goal a significantly less likely world in which men view the bodies of female strangers as products to be purchased and fucked, yet never, ever do them harm. Prostitution can and will one day be abolished, but world where male entitlement is enshrined into law yet somehow does not find its final expression in dead, raped, and battered women? Now that’s a utopia.

[parel]

Parel wrote:

So now I do full time activism, which pays badly but is more rewarding because it is helping to build a movement and assisting sex workers who are not as privileged as I ever was. even at my lowest.

Who pays for your pro-prostitution activism Parel? And you're located in Thailand no less, one of the main hubs of sex trafficking and sex tourism.

The UN provides the core funding for APNSW.

Bangkok is where the regional offices of UN Asia Pacific are.

We have three member groups from Thailand. Contact any one of them if you are really interested in what they're up to. Though I doubt you will. IME, no anti-traffickers want to speak to sex workers. They only want victims, but not too old, cuz they don't look pwetty on the posters.

But you can just as easily find out from Gloria Steinem and Equality Now who pays me since they are spying on our movement.

Your "feminist" mates in the Fascist States of AmerKKKa.

[parel]

This is a such a fucking waste of time. We could be talking about real experiences. Our own experiences.

Instead, we're arguing about fabricated "sexy" narratives. I hate these fucking women and the continual interference campaign they are running.

Your feminist utopia sounds like hell on earth. You and your partner "the state" are the enemy.

Not the patriarchy.

Played Out
March 11, 2014 by Maggie McNeill
Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out. – William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
https://maggiemcneill.files.wordpress.c ... harona.jpg

As regular readers know, the chief organization crusading for imposition of the Swedish model on Ireland is Ruhama, the new mask worn by the orders of nuns who for centuries enslaved many thousands of women in the horrible Magdalene laundries. Just barely over a year ago I published “Puppet Show”, in which I shared information from Irish and British activists exposing Ruhama’s chief puppet, Justine Reilly, as a convicted “pimp” with a long history of “reframing her experiences” to transform herself from ruthless businesswoman to naïve hooker to pathetic victim of “pimps” herself (whichever was most profitable at the time).Rachel Moran But soon after that column appeared, Ruhama unveiled a new star, Rachel Moran, whom they paid to present herself as the author of a fabricated memoir entitled Paid For. I say fabricated because over a year before it appeared a correspondent wrote to me saying that during a bad time she had shared her own unfinished memoir with people from Ruhama and had reason to believe they had photocopied much of it and would in the near future build some tragedy porn around it; when this book appeared she confirmed that much of it was plagiarized from her manuscript. But while Moran’s pantomime performance as victim-turned-author seems credible to True Believers and ignoramuses, it is utterly unbelievable to those involved in the tiny and close-knit world of sex work in Dublin. For months now, activist Gaye Dalton has been “tweeting” about the holes in Moran’s story, and on February 26th she actually filed an affidavit swearing to that testimony. When I expressed an interest in publicizing the affidavit Gaye kindly provided me with both scans and a transcription; I have combined the scans into a PDF for your perusal (her address and phone number have been pixilated to preserve her privacy), but here’s the heart of the document:

I sold sexual services on Waterloo and Burlington Roads in Dublin…between approximately June/July 1987 and March/April 1993…I worked there 5 or 6 nights a week…usually [arriving] at about 9:30pm and [working] until at least 2:30am. I spent most of my time on the streets either walking or in two places:

At the top of Waterloo Road by the corner of Wellington Lane
Near the corner of Burlington Road outside Dublin Institute of Advanced technology
In cold or wet weather I might also sit in my car either at the top of Waterloo Road, or on Burlington Road looking out on to Waterloo Road. The sex workers and regular clients were a small community that could be compared to the regular clientele of a pub, we all knew each other, at least by sight and were very much aware of new people, unusual occurrences, or any form of crime or abuse. Every woman I knew at that time worked independently, for herself, apart from two women who were in personal relationships that would have been abusive and coercive in any environment…Anyone who seemed underage was prevented from working, sent home if possible and reported to Gardai. Many of the women had teenage children of their own and were not easy to fool in this respect…Drug abuse was extremely rare and many women were actively involved in the “concerned parents” movement in their local communities.



At no time did I ever see, or hear of “Rachel Moran” author of Paid For and founder of “Space International” nor anyone resembling her, working in that area. In her book she claims to have worked near the corner of Wellington Lane from early evening until “the small hours”, which would have placed her within 15 yards of me for several hours most nights. I have asked several people…from that time and nobody else can remember her, or anyone like her, not only there but in any form of sex work indoor or outdoor, at any of the times she claims to have worked, between 1991 and 1998. Beyond this, in her book Paid For and…blog The Prostitution Experience she has described several people, but not one of them even resembles anyone I ever met or heard of. Like any small community of people there was gossip…we knew plenty about each other’s lives and were familiar with the known details of any abusive, awkward, or even interesting clients. She does not allude to anyone recognisable to me at all. At no time does she show any awareness of the terminology we used, nor even the material realities of our work. She has also, at times, claimed to have been arrested for soliciting before 1993. Not only was this impossible, but also, one of the first things you would be told as a sex worker at that time is that you could not be arrested for soliciting. She did not even know that.



Rachel Moran is making money from her book and speaking engagements as well as…making significant input into Justice Committees both sides of the border through totally misrepresenting herself and that entire community and time. Meanwhile real sex workers are denied all…self representation to refute [her claims]…I understand that it is unlawful for a person to obtain financial advantage from deceit, but I am personally more concerned with the damage to vulnerable, voiceless people that Rachel Moran will do with her lies. The idea of anyone so unscrupulous having any degree of control over sex workers’ lives in future…absolutely horrifies me. Justine Reilly, her partner in “Space International” (all reference suddenly removed from website in past few weeks) was discovered to be a convicted pimp in February 2013, after…putting herself forward in the media as a helpless victim. Ruhama sharonaI have never observed her to show any remorse towards the women she exploited, while at least one of these same women has been openly chastised by Ruhama for “disrespect” for alluding to her convictions. During consultations in both North and South of Ireland genuine sex workers have been treated as animals who cannot think and speak for ourselves while dishonest persons such as these have been put forward as speaking for us. Genuine sex workers have been abused, intimidated and excluded while blatant lies are treated with the greatest courtesy and respect…

I wish that I could believe that this affidavit will help to undermine Moran’s credibility with the Irish government, but I have little hope for that considering the obsequious deference it has rendered and continues to render to the Magdalene orders, both on the issue of compensation to their past victims and the issue of their current attempts to bring sex workers under their control once more. But I can and do hope that it has some deleterious effect on her credibility with the Irish people; each revelation like this one adds to the growing heap of evidence that Ruhama, like all prohibitionists, is a pack of sociopathic liars who will stop at nothing to subject all human sexual behavior to police and institutional violence.

I don't get paid to read this 'd' grade fiction but it sure takes up a lot of my time.
http://www.ruhama.ie/contact-us/voices- ... vor-blogs/