The reactions here to the Turn Off the Blue Light poster I wrote about have been interesting. That this would bring out mixed views was not entirely unexpected, the debate about the sex industry is one of the most bitterly unresolved of all debates in feminism. seepi‘s comments, in particular, provoked quite a bit of thought for me. She is a long-term reader of my blog so if you wish to respond to her comments you’re very welcome to debate her but bear in mind that she is not a troll.
I’m not embarrassed to say I would be mortified if my daughter became a sex worker.
I think the campaign is dodgy and whitewashing a dodgy industry.
For mine, sex work of all forms is the antithesis of feminism.
A psychologist friend of mine thinks there is no way for a woman to work for any length of time in the sex industry without becoming mentally damaged in some way.
A couple of things spring to mind for me with this comment. Firstly, whether you’d encourage your own daughter to enter the sex industry or not is not the right question to be asking in response to this poster. Although the poster borrows certain design elements from a job recruitment poster it is not, in fact, a recruitment poster. There are two big reasons why I think asking whether you’d want your daughter to be a sex worker is the wrong question for this poster. One, we know the industry to be highly stigmatised, which is the real point of the poster campaign, and we don’t want our children to be given a hard time ever so it’s obviously painful to think of ways in which they could feel rejected by their community. (Noting that there are many other channels for this kind of nastiness and none of them are legitimate – our children’s weight, disabilities, sexuality, race, family structure etc could all lead to them feeling rejection). Two, none of us is all that comfortable with going deep, deep into the world of our child’s sexuality, whether it be their childhood sexuality or their adult sexuality, so it is kind of unreasonable to expect that you can embrace thinking about them one day making a career out of sex.
The real question to ask oneself when looking at this poster is how do I want this woman to be treated? That is what the poster is about. And I have a difficult time believing that any feminist would really wish this woman to be shamed, harassed or ostracised. Years ago in preparing an article on sex work legislation I interviewed several female sex workers and I was struck by something they all told me. By far the greatest sadness they had with their job was the way they were viewed by women outside the industry. The stigma was isolating and demoralising. The woman on this poster has humanised sex workers, which is an incredibly important act, and she’s out there with her smiling face looking us right in the eye and telling us about how she’s a mother facing similar ‘work and family’ demands to our own, and I just can’t see it – I can’t see you wanting another mother to be treated like shit. Really. And it truly grieves me to think that on top of everything else she has going on with raising her two kids (god knows), that should I meet her or someone like her at school she is going to have to worry about what she tells me about her job and what I would think of her – because mothers, goddamnit, need solidarity.
I can understand, though, that for some readers it is difficult to marry up the vision of this mother and her smiling face and self-proclaimed choice with the other vision we have of the industry, which is that of a deeply exploitative and misogynist factory of female misery. I won’t lie, I have struggled with it at times myself and my views on sex work have flipped and flopped embarassingly over the years, even during the years of writing this blog. However, one conclusion I have reached as a feminist that I am not changing is that you must never ignore the voices of the women who actually are sex workers. Problem is I don’t know all that many sex workers – or at least not that I am aware – so I can only share the analogy I use for myself in getting my head around it all, which is the example of ‘drug culture’.
If you have never been part of this culture or anywhere close to it then you will probably find this analogy just as bewildering. But if, instead, you were someone who took ecstasy at a dance party every now and then, or who smoked weed with your friends at school, or who has a brother who is now a police officer but when he was young he sometimes took speed at music festivals, or even, you were once a ‘hard-core weekender’ taking a bit of anything and everything on weekends and generally straight by Monday – and now you’re a mother in the suburbs raising your kids and paying your mortgage/rent then you will know that the drug culture includes a wide range of experiences.
Some of those experiences are every bit as dreadful as the War on Drugs would have you think – people do lose jobs and sanity and freedom and eventually, their lives. But mostly that probably wasn’t what you saw/see in your experiences of drug culture. I know people who were ‘hard-core weekenders’ in their twenties, doing absolutely everything, and who are now CEOs in their forties. And I can’t even count the number of highly functional people I know who smoke weed regularly. Years ago I lived with a boy who smoked weed every single evening like some of us drink beers, and he held down a high-paid job, received promotions, developed intellectual property worth ridiculous amounts of money, visited his mother for dinner every Sunday, donated money to charities, frowned upon rudeness and today..? He has a family, a 4WD and an acreage. There is a reason why the anti-marijuana public service messages of the past are a source of kitsch amusement to us today. Now, I wouldn’t want to be recruiting anyone here – there are some terrible risks with drug-use and lots of very unhappy people with very, very difficult lives – and I am not exactly embracing the idea that my own children may one day want to experiment with the culture, either. But, the reality of drug culture for me doesn’t match up terribly well with the view people outside the culture have of drug-users. Maybe, just maybe, the same can be said for sex work?
There are many, many horrendous accounts of life in the sex industry, some amounting to nothing less than slavery, told by women and men (and children, gulp) selling services in the industry. We need to take some fucking action, we certainly need to listen, but like drug culture, there is a world of diversity here and we mustn’t silence any voices, even those for whom the experience is positive.
And one last thought.
A psychologist friend of mine thinks there is no way for a woman to work for any length of time in the sex industry without becoming mentally damaged in some way.
A psychologist treating sex workers has certainly got a story to tell about how sex work impacts on workers, but there is some sampling bias here, too, they are not seeing the sex workers who are finding everything tra-la-la absolutely fine-sy, and that doesn’t mean those workers don’t exist.
“A psychologist friend of mine thinks there is no way for a woman to work for any length of time in the sex industry without becoming mentally damaged in some way.”
I wonder if there is any way for a woman to live for any length of time in grinding poverty without becoming mentally damaged? Or work in one of the million other low-status jobs that don’t get anything like the attention sex work does?
Destigmatising sex work means treating it like any other kind of work – being honest about the bad side while still embracing the fact of a regular income. Yes, in an ideal feminist utopia there probably wouldn’t be a sex industry. But there probably wouldn’t be a house-cleaning industry either, and I’ve never heard anyone say house-cleaning is the antithesis of feminism.
I wonder how much of what is damaging about any kind of sex work IS the stigma we attach to it? Having to feel that you are hiding doing a job that you may feel is the right choice for you must be difficult in and of itself, regardless of whatever else goes on inside that industry.
Not only that, but I am incredibly leery of anything that limits choices and shames a woman being dressed up as feminism. Telling a woman who may otherwise enjoy her work, being a sexual person and expressing that and hey, making a decent living that she should be ashamed, that she is a bad person/feminist/provider/example is just taking the leash from men who objectify and control and holding it ourselves, surely? I just don’t see anything feminist about that at all.
There should and there must be transparency, regulation and control in the sex industry, purely because there is the potential for abuse – exactly like every other industry out there.
There really do seem to be several issues here being combined into one. First, does sex work necessarily damage people by it’s very nature? I think a lot of people who know sex workers of all different ilks who are quite happy with what they do would say no. Is there potential for exploitation, slavery? Absolutely. So regulation and transparency in the industry needs to be improved. I don’t think many would question that.
The idea that selling sex in any form MUST be damaging is fairly naive. Most of us trade sex for something at some stage in our lives (Or many stages in our lives) pleasure, comfort, love, children. There is quite frequently something being traded. T
I love your last point particularly. I find this a very helpful way to examine this whole industry for myself.
Sorry, this’ll be a double post because I pressed the button prematurely….
I wonder how much of what is damaging about any kind of sex work IS the stigma we attach to it? Having to feel that you are hiding doing a job that you may feel is the right choice for you must be difficult in and of itself, regardless of whatever else goes on inside that industry.
Not only that, but I am incredibly leery of anything that limits choices and shames a woman being dressed up as feminism. Telling a woman who may otherwise enjoy her work, being a sexual person and expressing that and hey, making a decent living from it that she should be ashamed, that she is a bad person/feminist/provider/example is just taking the leash from men who objectify and control and holding it ourselves, surely? I just don’t see anything feminist about that at all.
There should and there must be transparency, regulation and control in the sex industry, purely because there is the potential for abuse – exactly like every other industry out there. The very same thing could be said and has been said about Coal mining, for instance.
There really do seem to be several issues here being combined into one. First, does sex work necessarily damage people by it’s very nature? I think a lot of people who know sex workers of all different ilks who are quite happy with what they do would say no. Is there potential for exploitation, slavery, unhappiness? Absolutely. So regulation and transparency in the industry needs to be improved. The condition in which women who ARE doing it without being unhappy needs to be improved. I don’t think many would question that. But labeling all women in the sex industry as exploited and damaged is actually a bit insulting, well meaning as it may be.
The idea that selling sex in any form MUST be damaging is fairly naive. Most of us trade sex for something at some stage in our lives (Or many stages in our lives) pleasure, comfort, love, children. There is quite frequently something being traded for what is given. The idea that bringing money into the equation changes that on so many different fundamental levels usually comes from a place purely about the fact it is SEX being traded. And that needs to be unraveled before anything concrete about the industry can be explored.
“Telling a woman who may otherwise enjoy her work, being a sexual person and expressing that and hey, making a decent living from it…”
I’d be interested to know how many women are sex workers because they actually enjoy the sex they get from it. I don’t think that is the issue here. Isn’t bluemilk’s point that it is a job like any other? Whether they enjoy the sex or not is irrelevant just as whether I enjoy practising law or not is irrelevant to whether my job is a valid one deserving of respect like any other.
Thank you for this response, it’s really well thought out.
I am against prostitution and the prostitution industry. That doesn’t mean I am denigrating prostitutes or shaming them.
If I said I hate the building industry would every handyman feel aggrieved – would people be trying desperately to think of happy handymen they have known? Or to imagine some, if they have never actually heard of one?
People are taking a feminist position that it is bad for women to have the choice to be a happy prostitute taken away from them. But noone has ever met a happy, well balanced sex worker. This may be because there aren’t any, or becuase they don’t admit to their work. Some people self identify as undamaged sex workers. This could be taken as a form of denial.
To me it seems bizarre to intellectualise this issue by dreaming up pie in the sky scenarios of possible perfectly happy family women who happen to work as prostitutes. To me this ignores the reality of the industry.
Sex work is damaging because of the imbalance of power, rather than the money itself. It is also a physically dangerous industry for women. And riddled with drugs.
It is damaging to do sex work, as it takes a normal part of life and turns it into work – in much the same way as people who work in chocolate factories never want to eat chocolate, or people who are chefs can’t be bothered to cook at home.
Please don’t use the word “prostitution”. The preferred term is sex worker and has been for quite some time.
But noone has ever met a happy, well balanced sex worker.
And on what are you basing this great piece of research? It’s certainly not on your well founded knowledge of the sex industry.
Sex work is damaging because of the imbalance of power, rather than the money itself. It is also a physically dangerous industry for women. And riddled with drugs.
You don’t know anything about the power dynamics of sex work. Try doing a few jobs with decent peer support and new worker training, then come back and tell me if the client held all the power you currently think he does.
As for “physically dangerous”, there is nothing inherently physically dangerous about sex work that can’t be risk minimised with good OH&S. If you’re talking about the risk of violence, in most forms of sex work it’s just not as high as whorephobic media makes out, and what violence there is is driven by attitudes about sex workers being disposable and acceptable targets of violence. Fix the culture and you’ll get rid of the violence.
Blue Milk’s previous post addressed the drug issue, but you’ve chosen to ignore everything everyone said there. I don’t see you calling for the abolition of hospitality work because hospitality workers have some of the highest drug use rates in Australia.
“People are taking a feminist position that it is bad for women to have the choice to be a happy prostitute taken away from them. But noone has ever met a happy, well balanced sex worker. “
I could name half a dozen without even thinking too hard about it.
I reeeeeeally take issue with the “noone has met a happy, well balanced sex worker” line seepi is touting, but for a different reason to everydaykeri.
I know a sex worker who is wonderful, intelligent, powerful, incredibly secure in her choice to be a sex worker… but no, she’s not permanently “happy and well balanced”, because she’s also a varsity student with all the stress that entails and she has other things in her life, completely unrelated to her sex work, which cause her anxiety.
It’s like how I’m not a constantly “happy, well balanced” public servant because sometimes I get depressed, and then post irritable “argh my job sucks” updates on Facebook. Demanding, as seepi seems to, that we produce The Perfect Sex Worker Who Never Ever Ever Wishes She Didn’t Have To Work Today before seepi will take the assertion that not all sex work is coercive torture, is … well, just not arguing in good faith.
Exactly. There is an argument amongst anti sex work types that sex work can only be acceptable if every single person doing sex work is completely and 100 per cent ecstatic and well balanced 100 per cent of the time, which is a completely unreasonable request.
I have met hundreds of sex workers in my life and no, none of them exist in a perpetual state of bliss and mental balance. And yes, some of them have various reasons for being unhappy some or all of the time. Some of us even have mental illnesses, shock horror! But many of those sex workers are people I would say are generally happy with their lives most of the time, and many of them also have good mental health. To say that there is no such thing as a “happy and well balanced” sex worker is ridiculous.
“work can only be acceptable if every single person doing work is completely and 100 per cent ecstatic and well balanced 100 per cent of the time, which is a completely unreasonable request.”
Take out the sex bit and it becomes clear how, as Hexy says, ridiculous this statement is. We don’t hold any other type of work up to this standard, nor should we.
i’m feeling a little nervous about commenting on this, but just want to put a couple of thoughts down. i’m responding particularly to this: “By far the greatest sadness they had with their job was the way they were viewed by women outside the industry.”
i think historically, one of the reasons (apart from all the morality arguments) that they were viewed this way is because married women knew their husbands were visiting sex workers, and that infidelity is really difficult to take. it’s really hard when you’re struggling at home with kids, possibly struggling with finances, to know your husband is making the choice to use family income to basically cheat on the marriage contract. of course you could say that the wives should just leave their husbands, but it wasn’t that easy to leave and it still always isn’t. especially when a woman is facing a life of more extreme poverty, with young children in tow because she doesn’t have an education or career to fall back on, and sex work is not an option she’s interested in.
given the different patterns that relationships take nowadays, perhaps this isn’t such a strong factor, but i would suspect that it still is a factor.
the other thing is the pressure that can be put on women to participate in sexual acts they don’t feel comfortable with, because the alternative is to have your partner threaten to purchase those services elsewhere. again, not sure how much of an issue that is nowadays, but with the combination of porn and the sex work industry, i think some women do feel pressured to do things they don’t want/enjoy – it can often be more of a societal pressure than an individual one or a combination of both. again, a woman has the option of leaving any such relationship, but leaving is easier for some than for others.
having said that, i’m as concerned as others about the personal safety and health issues faced by sex workers and don’t see the above as any reason to take measures to deal with those. but i do think that sex work has consequences for women who aren’t involved in it, and i don’t really see that being acknowledged in many places.
I know you’ve not meant to, but you’ve basically said “whorephobia is OK, because men are jerks.” It’s not sex workers’ faults that men break promises to their partners or pressure them into acts they’re not into. Why shouldn’t those men be held responsible for their own behaviour?
no i basically did not say that i don’t appreciate being paraphrased like that. i’m not saying that the men shouldn’t be held responsible. but i don’t think many women are going to be very much liking the person their husband is sleeping around with. that is not the same as saying it’s ok to hate all sex workers and wish them ill, particularly in terms of physical violence and personal safety.
it may be your point of view that the third person in the scenario has no responbility whatsoever, but there are others who don’t share that point of view, and who think that that third person should also take some responsibility for the absolutely known effects their actions will cause – the pain, hurt, humiliation, and also in some cases the financial strain. sure, you can say “it’s not my problem, it’s the man’s fault and i really don’t care what his partner is going through”. but if that’s your position, then it’s hardly fair to expect good feelings from the person to whom you yourself have shown such little care (and i mean a generic “you” here, not you personally).
again, please don’t simplify this to “whorephobia is ok” because that’s not what i’m saying, even if that’s how it’s coming across to you. i don’t think that any of this is a reason to treat a sex worker badly or to wish her ill. but i find it hard to reconcile a position that says “i don’t care what harm my actions cause to other people and i have no responsibility for that even though i know that in some cases this will happen” and yet expect those same people who have been harmed to provide unconditional and full support
as to your point about holding men responsible, that would be great. they certainly take the major share of the blame here, no doubt about it. at present there are no structures to hold them responsible for the damage they cause. the only options for their partners are to stay and put up with it or to leave. and as i said in my first comment, leaving can be complex and difficult.
I agree that sex work – probably more porn than anything – has consequences for women outside of the industry in the way it changes societal norms around sex, ie. men’s expectations of sex and also the way sexuality is expressed by both men and women.
I wonder if you’re folding this into another very specific issue – which is feeling threatened by the ‘other woman’ whomever she is, sex worker or not. I mean, I had a bit of a thing against German women for a time because Bill’s ex-girlfriend, who turned into a stalker, happened to be German. Racist of me? Yes. Understandable that I might be a bit prejudiced when I was working through a tough, vulnerable time for me/us? Probably, yes. Good that I let go of that and stopped blaming Germany and all German women? Hell yes. (Sorry Germany!)
On another note, your comment reminded me that I still haven’t seen a perfect examination of the motivation for slut-shaming by women yet.. and I think hexy is right, that this kind of slut-shaming anxiety does amount to whore-phobia. So far I have seen two clear motivations named in feminist pieces about slut-shaming and that is a) efforts to distance oneself from the slut so as not to be shamed oneself and b) jealously over the attention the slut is receiving from men. I think there’s more going on and I wonder if part of it is a sense of anger by some women against other women for not holding what other women view to be a line that is being maintained with men.. anyway, complicated issue, because it says something important about powerlessness that women turn on other women rather than on men and also that there are all kinds of scraps of power being fought over by women from men.. and I don’t want to derail this thread but I must come back to this and think about it some more sometime.
i know i’m really late coming back to this and the conversation has really moved on (as well as pretty much closed), but i just didn’t feel up to it until now.
i just wanted to make one point about this reply – i think the whole “german” example is false equivalence. it’s not the same thing at all. let me take a step back: we’re talking about a third person who is basically inserting themselves into an already existing relationship between two other people. now the people in the existing relationship have the primary responsibility, especially if they have not agreed to an open relationship, to ensure they don’t harm the other and that they are open and honest about any other sexual relationships they undertake before they enter into them. as i’ve said above, i do think the third person also has responsibilities to ensure that they aren’t getting involved with someone in a closed relationship – not because they are responsible for policing the existing relationship, but out of a concern for the the party who will be hurt – and it’s pretty forseeable that this person will be hurt.
if the third person doesn’t check that the relationship is an open one, and proceeds, i don’t think you could expect the other partner to have goodwill or even neutrality towards you. well perhaps some people might expect that, but i suspect a lot of people don’t. i suspect a lot of people will feel extremely hurt by their partner, and also hurt by the third person who didn’t bother to check or show any concern about their wellbeing.
now, i don’t understand why you would bring a nationality into this. is it a common characteristic of germans to get involved in existing relationships? i don’t see how you could go from “a german person had a relationship with my partner” to “all german people are in the habit of having relationships with other people’s partners”.
sex work does have that characteristic. a lot of sex workers are in the business of having a sexual relationship (in which i include a single interaction) with people who are already in a relationship. so the point of my long-winded post is that the generalisation in the second case is not the same as the generalisation in your case of the german ex-girlfriend.
also, if the ex girlfriend was a current girlfriend having a relationship with your husband at the time when he is with you, and you don’t know about it – what then? i expect that you would be really hurt about the actions of your partner, but how would you feel about her? possibly you’re able to see her as faultless, but i think many other people wouldn’t. and possibly other people would have a problem with financially profiting from that situation on top of everything else.
having said all that, i’m again reiterating that this doesn’t mean sex workers should be abused, violated or be made to suffer. i’m just trying to say that this may be a reason behind some people being uncomfortable with sex work and unable to treat it as just any profession. i don’t think this particular aspect has anything to do with slut-shaming – as long as no-one is making a judgement about how many people the third party sleeps with who aren’t in a closed and committed relationship. and i find it difficult to categorise it as whorephobia as well, because i’d see it as a genuine feeling of hurt caused by specific actions. but YMMV.
@stargazer – I think perhaps that the blame lies with the partner playing around, not the sex worker. Many people don’t go to sex workers, they go to clubs and pick up other partners there. It is the responsibility of the person in the relationship to think of their partner, not the person being picked up. Although it would be nice if the person being picked up tried to find out if the person was married, it is not their fault if someone decides to stray. I would question that the relationship is committed. I would also say that it is not my place to tell other people how to run their relationships as I have no idea what happens in them.
If someone needs to pay a sex worker to get something that they can’t get at home, who am I to judge. How do I know that the person getting their needs met is not then able to be a better partner in their relationship because that thing that was causing tension is now resolved?
This also assumes that people paying for sex are in committed relationships, and are only straying because the opportunity is there. I think that where there is a will there is a way and these people would stray anyway.
I read many feminist blogs yet I’m still unsure where I stand on the pornography and prostitution issue. I think both sides have valid points.
Even if sex work is a valid choice I don’t think it’s just a job like any other. I don’t think the comparisons to minumum wage jobs work. You can argue that people looking for work should be satisfied with working in a shop yet you wouldn’t tell people on benefits to just become a sex worker instead. (of course there are also huge problems with prejudice against those on benefits).
People don’t care about the age, gender or looks of the person working on the checkout or sorting your mail. I think a better comparison would be with dancers or models, as these are professions where your appearance matters.
Another comparison could be with being a housewife or stay at home mother. Feminists can see it as problematic if women in general are expected to be housewives and yet respect the choice of individual women as what’s best for them in their situation.
I agree that saying it is a job like any other is problematic. If a person on a benefit got offered a job as a sex worker and turned it down, should that disentitle them to a benefit? Should job centres send people to interviews at brothels? These are questions we need to think through when we say that it ought to be treated as a job like any other.
One of my big concerns with sex work is not whether the person enjoys the sex work or not but the impact it may have on having a healthy sexual relationship outside of work. For me at least, I can’t imagine being a sex worker as a job and then still enjoying sex with my partner. But I could stand corrected.
I’m in a similar position of not having a really firm opinion on tall of this. I am all for women being free to choose what to do with their bodies, so I suppose that if they choose to sell some sort of access to their bodies, I should be OK with that.
But… it seems to me that very few women would choose sex work over, say, a highly paid career in business or as a lawyer, doctor, or the like. I have not read extensively on the topic, but I suspect that most women who choose sex work do not feel like a highly paid career in a “standard” field is an option- i.e., they are choosing sex work because it is the only route they see to decent pay.
And that feels like a failure of society to me. So maybe I will be comfortable with sex work when I think that society is doing a better job of offering all of its members a fair chance at choosing a different career.
In my part of the world, there is a huge problem with gang members preying on young, vulnerable women and luring them into sex work. The women get almost none of the money, and in many cases have no real choice about the work. I am not at all OK with this- and I’m pretty sure no one here would be.
But- in college, I knew a classmate who was exotic dancing to pay her way through school, and I was OK with that.
So I guess a lot comes down to how freely the choice to do sex work is made.
And I have to say- that college classmate would have much preferred to be on a scholarship. She viewed exotic dancing as the best of bunch of bad options. So again- that she felt this was the best choice available to her feels like a failure of society.
Finally, I really agree with Rose’s point about the importance of age and appearance in sex work. This does not seem to be a career choice that will age well. And that seems problematic to me.
From the anecdata files, I work with one worker who chose sex work over law. I also know many who do sex work as a second job. Sex work and nursing professions seem to be a common pairing.
But what’s wrong with choosing your job because it (might) pay well? Do we pass judgement on people in any other industry when they make their career decisions on this basis?
As for the career choice not “ageing well”, there are plenty of careers that are primed for youth for various reasons: modelling, acting, professional sports. The difference is, people will recognise them as skilled work when you put them on a resume. The answer here is destigmatising the industry so that employers are accepting of sex work experience as skilled work experience when sex workers try to move on to different work after a long time in the industry, if we do. Some don’t – believe it or not, there’s actually a thriving market for mature aged sex workers, although obviously not big enough to sustain every worker staying on indefinitely.
There is nothing wrong with choosing a career based on money. But I think there is a problem lumping all sex work together. Did your friend choose prostitution over law (sorry, can’t think of a nicer word that is specific)? Or exotic dancing? Or being a porn actress?
I don’t think you’ll ever argue me around to being comfortable with the idea that sex work is a job like any other, but I can’t really explain why. Sorry.
I’ve thought a little more on this… I think my problem boils down to this: sex work is the only career I know in which it is not uncommon for the workers to have been forced into it. And I don’t mean forced by not having money, or not having other options. I mean literally forced into it, on pain of beatings (or worse).
I think that says something, and is probably why I am more comfortable with exotic dancing and porn as careers than with actually selling sex.
Perhaps you would argue that once the choice to sell sex is destigmatized, more women would choose to do it freely, and this problem would go away. I’m not so sure.
Also, since we’re in the realm of anecdata, here’s mine: on a trip to a conference in London many years ago, I ended up at a strip club with a group of men. Why is a long story that mainly illuminates how male dominated my field is, so I won’t tell it here. What is relevant to this post is that the owner of the club approached me and offered me a job. But the pay he quoted was lower than the pay I was making in my job- and I was at that point fairly junior in my chosen profession and paid about half of what I am paid now. He was visibly shocked when I told him that. I was surprised that dancing with your clothes off paid so little.
With all that said, I do not have a problem with women making different choices that I do in this regard. I find the majority of the sex industry to be degrading to women, but I accept that there may be parts that are not and ways to do it that individual women do not find degrading. I think that most of the porn I’ve ever seen is so unrealistic about women as to be laughable, but then- so are most of the mainstream movies I have seen. So, I hope that I succeed in disapproving of aspects of the industry without disapproving of the women who work in it… but I know that sounds a bit like “love the sinner and hate the sin” and probably more than a little condescending. I’m not sure if I can fix that, though.
I don’t think we have to get to a place of thinking sex work is like any other job to get to a place where we can support sex workers and dismantle stigma, because not many jobs are “just like any other job”. Lots and lots of lefties have visibly shuddered when they heard I was an economist. They hate my field and hate my profession – a lot of them without knowing anything much about my field, I might add, a bit like the complaints of sex workers.
How do you know it’s “not uncommon” for people to be forced into sex work? What are you basing that on? In Australia, at least, the pimp-figure is extremely rare. We know this from both academic research and anecdotal evidence. I suspect you’re just buying into stereotypes about sex workers, and that’s not cool.
As for what kind of sex work my colleague chose over law, does it matter? Why does your opinion of her decision change based on whether she’s using her genitals to do her work or not?
Hexy- as I said originally, I was talking about my little corner of the world, which is San Diego, CA. Gang culture is strong in areas here, and there is a big problem with gang members forcing young women into prostitution. Here are some reports from my local public radio station, which cite the relevant studies:
http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/public_safety/responder/article_0b4cfbb0-f1d8-11df-be29-001cc4c002e0.html
http://www.kpbs.org/news/2010/nov/16/gangs-contributing-rise-prostitution/
Since you strayed into the realm of anecdata, I have to tell you that their interviews with some of the women were heartbreaking.
Oh, and my opinion of your friend who decided not to be a lawyer doesn’t change depending on what sort of sex work she does. But my opinion of how generalizable her experience is does.
There are some horrible stories out there, I don’t deny that. But the fact that some men are abusive (which is what we’re talking about, abuse) shouldn’t impact on the rights of people to engage in either work or consensual sex, and when people start saying they’re “uncomfortable” with sex work, I hear the same rhetoric that is used to criminalise us.
I guess my major objection to this argument is that you are basically saying “abusive men/people use violence to force people to do sex work, therefore sex work is bad.” Abusive men/people use violence to force people to do housework in far greater numbers, but we recognise in those instances that the problem is the abusive men and the violence, not the housework.
I whole-heartedly agreed with your post until you drew the analogy with drug culture. Yikes, I almost completely disagree with that analogy. When I have time and energy I will write more why but basically it comes down to the idea that sex work definitely has more of an element of exploitation to it than taking drugs. And I’d hazard a guess that more people enjoy taking drugs than having sex for money. I am not sure there is quite the same range of experiences with having sex for money as their is with taking drugs. Having taken cocaine once is quite different from having been paid for sex once – not sure the latter is as common as the former (how common is it for someone to be paid for sex just once or “dabble in it” so to speak) and would, I imagine, be much more harmful to your self-esteem and sense of self-worth.
There is nothing inherently harmful to your self-esteem and sense of self-worth about being paid for sex. Quite the contrary: sex work has been incredibly good for my body image and self esteem.
Well that is good to know in YOUR case. While I appreciate that we need to hear about the spectrum of experience, I do have some issue with generalising from your experience. Just as I have an issue with generalising from the experience of the drug-addicted sex worker walking the streets. You are an educated, intelligent and assertive woman who is perfectly happy with your choices, which is great. But just as you are saying that seepi etc isn’t acknowledging your experience, you also aren’t acknowledging the concerns of some of the other posters than sex work can be more harmful and exploitative than other jobs. And the experience of these woman aren’t acknowledged here.
Oh, come on. There is a sea of talk out there in the world about how terrible sex work can be and we have one little sex worker come here and say something positive about her job and her personal experiences and we want her to provide more balance?
Yes, when she generalises from her own experience in the way she has and disagrees with any comment that sex work could be harmful.
I stand by my statement. There is nothing inherently harmful about being paid for sex. Internalised whorephobia’s a killer, but the act of receiving money for sex itself is not harmful.
Analogies are never meant to be an exact mirror of a situation, so picking them apart can be a little redundant and derailing. I think the way this analogy was used is pretty effective in illuminating what I perceived as the intended point – that generalising an experience, particularly when those generalisations are made by people outside of the experience – are not really representative of many people’s reality of that. And partaking in an industry or culture that is typically misrepresented does not indicate any particular personality type, personal undertaking, or eventual outcome.
My main concern about a feminist discussion of sex work is that we strive for nuance. I think it’s possible to demand better working conditions and less social stigma for sex workers while also seeking to eradicate the more exploitative corners of the industry. But it’s hard for me to participate in those nuanced conversations, because I have trouble staying objective.
Basically, I just popped in here to say – I’m a sex worker. I’m a mother, a feminist, a fat acceptance activist, a writer, a blogger, a hippie, a homesteader, and I work in pornography. I like to say that I have two jobs – porn and blogging – Porn is the one that takes up a tiny bit of time but makes me a lot of money and blogging is the one that takes up all my time but makes me no money. 🙂 I’m passionate about both of them.
I don’t assume that my overwhelmingly positive experience with porn is representative of all women who work in a sex industry, but I’d also appreciate it if other people didn’t assume that I must necessarily be exploited, abused, or damaged in some way because I work in porn.
I know several happy sex workers. They are some of the most articulate, intelligent, savvy, sexy and powerful women I know. Seepi makes so many generalisations about sex workers and panders to so many stereotypes about sex workers that I don’t even know where to begin addressing her comments. So I won’t. I know I don’t want to be a sex worker and I am not particularly partial to porn but I will defend other women’s rights to be and partake.
Right – there was recently an article about a woman who was an adult film star and volunteered to read to a classroom of children. Later, there was a backlash that she should not have been allowed to do this. I’m sorry, reading to children is now somehow harmful? She was a law abiding citizen, this is crazy!! Of course she should be treated like everyone else. Want to volunteer? Yes – please! We need more role models. It’s not like the kids know her films anyway, and if they do – shame on the parents (or whoever) not the school or the star!
I like that this campaign acknowledges the dignity and humanity of this woman but I don’t like that it potentially glosses over… Even denies…. the indignity and inhumanity of prostitution. Over years working with women in prison I came to believe that the heroin and sex trades were inextricably linked… Of course with backup from a bunch of sexist institutions… And a rapacious economic system. If this poster makes any woman think “sex work” is a comfortable, middle class option with good pay and conditions …. In my opinion it has backfired badly. We do need to hear the voices of the women who sell sex… But the women I met in prison were silenced by so many mechanisms it was breathtaking.
And you don’t think that, by examining only the cases of women in prison, you might have gotten a slightly biased sample in your examination of whether sex work and heroin use/dealing are linked?
I certainly agree that women in prison are a silenced voice, but to pretend they represent all or most sex workers is just as silly.
Well it wasn’t a research project… It was a legal job. But point taken that my “sample” was skewed. I was responding to the poster primarily… Which I like less and less the more I think about it because of the way it obscures the experience of the women I worked with… They also “chose” a job that suited their needs… To stay alive… To afford their next fix… To stay in Australia…. To avoid a bashing. I don’t blame other sex workers for their plight…. And I support decriminalisation…. But that poster bugs me. Even the fact that this mother’s “choices” are so limited that selling intimate access to her body is the best option she has in terms of working hours and pay. It’s not a cause for celebration surely?
In reply to Karen – maybe she simply enjoys her job and finds it pays better than her other ‘options’? Maybe she likes sex and enjoys the fact that she can meet a need for herself and someone else and get paid for it? There may be many reasons why she has chosen sex work, not because her options were so limited as to essentially force her into it.
That perspective only makes sense if you presume that she views selling sexual services (not “intimate access to her body”) as horrible and a violation. This is not necessarily the case.
The poster is not a govt initiative, it is run by a sex worker group. So perhaps they’d be quite happy if it encouraged more people into sex work.
I agree with parts of many comments above.
I see sex work as inherently degrading to women – all women. I wish it didn’t exist. I don’t want to see ads for ‘Cindy, young, new to town, ready to please’ in my local paper. I don’t want my children to see leering women as part of normal life. I think that the fact that a man can buy a women whenever he wants is a fundamental problem in our society.
I also see prostitution and drug use as very closely connected.
I have seen research showing sex workers to be largely comprised of single mothers, students, and heroin addicts. Of the handful of women I know from this industry all fall into one of these categories.
It is a massive failing in our society that single mothers and students find sex work to be their best option.
It seems to be a very unpopular view, but for mine, I would disallow prostitution, and the small number of women who survive this career happily would miss out, but for me that is a worthwhile sacrifice if the rest of this sad and seedy industry would disappear.
– i know there would still be illegal prostitution, but I would still ban it, and increase rehabilitation options.
– I am a bit shocked that being anti-prostitution is so radical as to be seen as troll-like!
Also, I would note this from one of the two sex workers who have joined this conversation:
“I think it’s possible to demand better working conditions and less social stigma for sex workers while also seeking to eradicate the more exploitative corners of the industry”.
We all have common ground here, lots of it, surely?
Sex worker organisations have no vested interest in increasing the number of people doing sex work, any more than support networks focussed on health and safety in any other industry have a vested interest in expanding those industries. Their focus is on rights, not recruitment.
Putting aside the fact that you want to criminalise what consenting adults do with other consenting adults sexually, which is just gross, criminalisation of the sex industry doesn’t work to reduce the size of the sex industry. All it does is subject sex workers, and predominantly sex workers who are poor women, women of colour, trans women, and the intersection of all three, to gaol, fines, police violence and corruption, sexual assault by police, and increased risk of STIs. When you say you support criminalisation, you are saying you do not care about women.
hexy – this thread is straying into lots of sex work 101 stuff.. your participation is very much appreciated but I can understand if at some point soon it is too frustrating/tiring to continue.
Thanks, I appreciate having that acknowledged. It is getting a little wearying, and I may bow out soon.
I don’t think the drug use analogy works. Partly because I know exactly one person who was an occasional user of party drugs who now has a good life. Every single other person I know, from my point of view, it has affected their life negatively in a range of ways.
And, for the point of the post, sex work. It should be legal and safe as possible; the experiences of women who are doing it should always be sought and listened to; and we should remember that there is huge potential for problems and risks to women. And I think we should still work towards a world where we don’t need to think about this, either because the demand from men is greatly decreased or the industry is so accepted and safe it’s not a worry.
I think the key with both drug use and sex work (not that I think they are comparable really – one is something people do for fun, one is work, for a start) is not that HEY there are all these people who are doing SO GREAT! who do this, but HEY let’s address the problems in these two areas.
I have to say that I know dozens of people who use drugs recreationally and maintain good, functional lives. Keep good jobs, raise happy health children etc.
Hendo, really? Everybody you know who tried weed went on to heroin and ended up dead in an alleyway? And they all got into it by being lured along by dealers hanging around these alleyways trying to ensnare people in their one hit and you’re hooked traps? Because that’s how the War on Drugs describes it and that’s how people outside the culture think it really happens?
“I don’t want my children to see leering women as part of normal life.”
I’m sure you don’t watch 2.5 men either, but why are leering men so much part of society whereas leering women are something that must never be seen. Were is this leering strawwoman anyway, she is certainly not in the poster.
I think your view of the sex industry is quite stereotypical. I’m not saying that the industry you describe does not exist, but I don’t think it is the whole of the industry. Just because a study says it doesn’t mean that it is true for everyone, and it depends on who asks. Like your psychologist friend – if they determined the happiness of society based purely on their clients what sort of warped view would they have? Or a Dr thining about the wellness of society based on their patients? Oh hey, everyone is sick because I only see sick people?
The leering women are in my local paper,rows of them in the classifieds, often right next to births and deaths. Depressing.
I find that leering men and leering women are Both a part of the degradation of women. Leering women (in sex ads) are basically saying ‘here I am boys, just for you’. Leering men are saying ‘you’re there for me to look at’.
I could do without leering men and leering women in my day to day life, altho I admit to finding 2.5 men funny on occasion – until it became a parody of real life and charlie Sheen’s drug use tipped over from Partying to Plotloss.
I know plenty of people who smoked pot and are now living happy lives. Harder drugs not so much. All of their lives have gone to shit basically. Three took up sex work. ONe is a close relative. She never mentions her sex work and pretends it never happened. It is a shit industry, and I am just not convinced it is good for anyone at all – even the very few who claim to thrive on it.
I think what troubles me is the idea that it is like any other job. I definitely think we need to get rid of the shaming aspect and the poor treatment and respect given to sex workers. But the actual job itself isn’t like any other job, surely? Like I said above, if we were really comfortable with that idea then we’d have to be comfortable with job centres sending women off for interviews at brothels. While I don’t actually have any moral problem with the existence of sex work (and strongly disagree with the suggestion that is should be criminalised), what concerns me is the effect that sex work would have on enjoyment of sex otherwise. And I see that as a serious harm. I could be completely wrong but sex work has the potential to turn sex from what is a pleasurable and, for some, spiritual, experience into mere work. I know this makes me conservative but I think that is sad. And I don’t think the same can be said for other jobs – how much does being an economist spoil bluemilk’s enjoyment of economics outside of work?
I’m leaning towards the view that it would be like any other job if society treated it that way.
Also, I know a few lawyers who read so much for their work they basically can’t face the idea of reading books for enjoyment. It’s pretty sad but not an indictment on all legal work.
Really? In my state (and most US states), a woman on welfare has to look for work and accept any job for which she is qualified or she loses her benefits. So are you OK with a woman being told that she has to become a sex worker or lose her benefits?
Despite what Hexy thinks I think… I actually have no problem with a woman freely choosing this line of work. I have no problem with the women who choose this line of work. She and I disagree on how often that choice is freely made, and I will concede that I have not studied the issue deeply enough to have any actual statistics on that. But she has not offered them, either, and I know that some women are forced into this work, be it by a lack of other options or actual physical force.
And I have a HUGE problem with it being forced on a woman in anyway. I do not have this problem with, for instance, a woman being told that she has to take a job at her local fast food chain or lose her welfare benefits. But I can’t fathom telling a woman that she has to go into any sort of sex work or lose her benefits.
Ergo, this cannot be a job like any other.
That does not mean that I think we should stigmatize the woman who CHOOSE to do it.
But the nuanced opinion of sex work that was mentioned upthread? I think that goes both ways.
Also,I don’t think there is anything wrong with expecting people who choose to be sex workers to think about their industry and their part in it, and whether or not they think it is doing “the right thing”- in much the same way that I think is fair for society to expect me to think about my industry (biotech/pharma- so you know, not a universally loved industry) and whether or not it is doing the right thing. When I see something wrong, I can decide whether or not I have the ability to try to change it- but I should be willing to really look and see the problems, because who better than an insider to think about how they might be fixed? I think it is fair to expect that of sex workers, because I expect that of people working in any industry.
Actually, I am not in favour of forcing people of accept jobs or else lose their benefits. Regardless of what that job is. So I guess we disagree on that.
That hasn’t happened anywhere that sex work is decriminalised or legalised, so I think it’s a bit of a straw man. We seem to be quite capable of having sex work be an exception to those rules.
Sorry, that was in response to Cloud’s comment about benefits.being withdrawn if women don’t do sex work.
Hexy, there is a bit of the pot calling the kettle black on the strawman front, don’t you think? You’ve set up several yourself, including this one right here.
I wasn’t arguing that the benefits link comes with decrminalization. In fact, if you look, I didn’t argue against decriminalization at all. In none of my comments have I said anything at all about my opinion on whether or not aspects of sex work should be criminal. If you want to know- I’d be fine with decriminalizing the portions of sex work that are illegal in my state. But I also don’t think that would be a panacea- the places I am aware of that have decriminalized still have some problems with the industry, right?
Read my comment. I just said that the fact that we wouldn’t be willing to make that link makes sex work a job unlike almost all other jobs. I stand by that comment.
You seem determined to see me saying things I’m not saying. I’m not sure there is a point in continuing this discussion. I’m sorry if I’ve offended you.
I’m sorry, I’m honestly not sure what the point is of bringing up “are you OK with people being forced to do sex work or losing their benefits” if you’re not of the opinion that this is a thing that will happen. I was simply pointing out that this is not a thing that happens, anywhere, so I don’t see the point in pretending that it’s likely to start happening if we stop stigmatising sex work. We’re perfectly capable of treating sex work like a normal job and still acknowledging that forcing people to have sex when they’re not consenting is not OK.
I agree, it definitely seems like a stretch to imagine that we would go from criminalizing and in many cases vilifying sex work, to decriminalizing it and making it part of the pool of jobs which must be accepted if a position is offered or risk losing benefits. I just cant see that happening, and it is a slightly disingenuous misinterpretation of the campaign to de-stigmatise sex work and allow for job security in the form of benefits, insurance, superannuation, whatever. I think it is pretty clear that is what the term a job like any other’ is referring to.
Hexy, I’m sorry- I had to take a break from this thread. I wasn’t intending to come back to it, actually, but I figured out what went wrong for our conversation and I wanted to come back and apologize for my part in that. I’m not sure if you’re still reading, but if you are, please believe me that I write this comment with no judgement of your choice to do sex work, and my apology is sincere, even though I do not in fact agree with a lot of what you have written.
As I stated in my very first comment on this thread, I’m not 100% sure of what I think about this subject. So when I engaged in this thread, my goal was to learn from other people’s points of view. I was frustrated because I felt like you were arguing with things I hadn’t said, so I wasn’t learning anything.
But with the help of hindsight I realize that you are of course much more personally invested in this subject than I am, and have a much longer history of arguing with people about it, so you quite naturally felt attacked/judged and heard the arguments that you are used to hearing, even if those weren’t the arguments I thought I was making.
So I apologize for not realizing this at the time, and writing more carefully. And I apologize for making you feel judged. That wasn’t my intent.
But I think there is a lesson for all of us in this- sometimes, the person disagreeing with you isn’t doing so for the reasons you expect. I lost out on a chance to learn more, but you lost out on a chance to maybe bring me closer to your point of view.
So for what it is worth, here is my last attempt to write what I think on this subject, which I offer with the caveat that I haven’t actually ever thought about this subject all that much, so my opinion is open to change as I think about it more.
You asked why I brought up the fact that we would never require a woman to go into sex work or risk losing her welfare benefits. I did so solely to answer the assertion that sex work is a job like any other. I think the fact that we are not willing to expect any woman who needs work to take this job is actually pretty important. I can think of only one other class of jobs that fall into this category- jobs such as soldier, police office, or fireman.
But just because it isn’t a job just like any other, that doesn’t mean we necessarily should outlaw it or stigmatize the people who work in that industry. We obviously don’t outlaw soldiers, and at least in my country, we’ve moved past stigmatizing them, even when we disagree with the wars they might be sent to fight.
In thinking about this thread, I realized that we were all talking about the job, but there is another aspect- the product. It is not uncommon at all for society to decide that it wants to regulate the product of an industry. To use a weak analogy, I work in drug discovery and development. The products of my industry are highly regulated. A company that wants to bring a new drug to market has to jump through many, many regulatory hoops. This is a good thing, because the products my industry produces are unlike most others- they have the potential to do great good, but also the potential to do immense harm. So our society has decided that we need to prove safety and efficacy before we can release a new product. And anyone who wants to work in my industry has to live with these regulations, even if we sometimes think they are not 100% correct.
I think the product of your industry also has the potential to do harm. I allow that it has the potential to do good, too, but I think there is an unusual aspect to your industry, in that your product can perhaps do harm even to people who do not choose to consume it. Therefore, I do not think it is unreasonable for society to choose to regulate what products your industry can offer.
I do not know where I would draw the line. But I do know that I think society has the right to have an open debate about where that line should be, even if the end result is that you end up having to accept regulations on your industry that you do not agree with.
OK, I’ll shut up on this now. I’m sorry for the long post, and again, I’m sorry for any hurt I have caused during this discussion.
Cloud,
Thank you for returning, and I understand the need to take a break. You’re right that this isn’t a topic I find it easy to discuss objectively. People often don’t seem to realise that when they talk abstractly about how sex workers should be criminalised, legislated, stigmatised and treated or viewed differently to other people, they’re talking about me as well as to me. And not just me, but many of my friends, partners and lovers.
Anyway.
To address your point about regulating the “product” of sex work, I think you’re trying to create a product where there isn’t one. The only product of sex work (excluding porn, where the product is already thoroughly regulated) is pleasure and human connection. Most sex work is a service, not good production. It’s oppressive to regulate what humans due with their own bodies when they aren’t infringing on the rights of other people, especially when we’re talking about what humans do sexually with their bodies.
I do agree that the products of the porn industry should be regulated, although we may disagree on what regulations should be in place.
As for your point about benefits, as I said before, I think we’re quite capable of recognising sex work as work whilst at the same time acknowledging that it is oppressive to coerce someone into sexual acts. Why can’t sex work be considered work like any other work, with the exemption that the government can’t coerce you into doing it? As you’ve pointed out, there are already occupations that exist with these exemptions, so sex work is hardly unique.
hexy, why can’t I recognize sex work as work without accepting that it is like any other work? That is essentially what I’m saying. That I think it is work, and should be legal and there should be protections for the people who do the work, but that it isn’t a job like any other. I suspect, but am not sure, that this feeling is why I am not all that comfortable with the campaign poster Blue Milk posted.
I think all work has a product, even if it is hard to define. And I think people in a society have a right to comment on the product of work, particularly when they feel that the product is having an impact on their life- i.e., I think Seepi’s feeling that she is harmed by the product of your work is valid and deserves attention, even if society ultimately decides that the harm she feels is outweighed by benefits others feel.
To consider that a non sex worker’s feelings of being “harmed” by sex work is more important than a sex worker’s feelings of being harmed by that person’s whorephobia is in itself whorephobia. It’s the equivalent of saying that your opposite sex marriage will be harmed if Teh Gays are allowed to get married. It’s just bigotry.
Viewing sex work as sitting in its own unique category encourages legislators to do the same, which encourages legislation that harms sex workers. The best health and safety outcomes for sex workers come from treating sex work like any other business. We deserve to live without the stigma of being the Other.
I think Lauredhel made a really good point about the many kinds of business that are exempt from the “if you don’t take your job, you’ll lose your benefits” rule.
Hexy, I think we’re just going to have to agree to disagree, because I am completely failing to communicate my viewpoint to you.
I didn’t say that a non-sex worker’s feelings on the topic are more important than yours- just that they don’t deserve to be rejected without consideration, which frankly, is what you seem to be doing. Some people feel harmed by the product of your industry. You may not like that, but you can’t pretend that is not the truth. In some cases, that feeling of harm may be due to prejudices. But in some cases, real harm may occur. Again, you may not like that, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
And I refuse to lump work that I don’t see as the same as other types of work into the same bucket just because some legislators might be confused if I don’t do that. In my view, a logical fallacy is still a logical fallacy even if it supports an outcome I might agree with, and bending the truth to support an argument is wrong even if it is done with the best of intentions. I appreciate that you don’t see things this way, and I’m sorry- this is not an opinion I am likely to change, because I apply it pretty much across the board. I would, however, call out the logical fallacies advanced by the other side.
Also, it occurred to me today that it is actually very straightforward to define the product of sex work. It is a sex act, a dance, a movie, or a set of pictures. For some people, that product results in an increase in pleasure, but that is an effect of your product, not the product itself, just like an erection is an effect of a famous product of one pharmaceutical company, but is not the product itself (that little blue pill is). I apologize if this distinction seems pedantic or unnecessary, but it seems important to me. Your product has good effects for some, but may also have bad effects for others, including others who might not choose to partake in your product. And I think we as a society have the right to discuss those effects and arrive at a set of regulations that we think balances those effects properly.
I think we might have to agree to disagree, indeed, because I don’t accept that a sex act or a dance move is a “product”. I think a sex act or a dance move can be a service, but a service is not necessarily a product. I think you’re trying to claim apples are aardvarks, and you’re still advocating the regulation of what consenting adults do with their bodies sexually.
I still do not accept the premise that someone can be harmed by someone they have never met and have no connection to doing sex work that does not involve them in any way, and I do not wish to argue about this whorephobic point any further.
@Cloud. I agree whole-heartedly with basically everything you have written here. I just don’t have the energy to respond. So I am glad you are doing it. I definitely don’t see you as being “whorephobic.”
So, Cloud, are you basically saying that all industries have individual regulations which are tailored to the risks particular to that industry and that the sex work industry would also need its own specific regulation that takes into account the potential risks that the accompanies the industry?
If so, that seems to be a fairly sensible argument. I guess then it is a matter of separating logical and reasonable regulations from those driven by misinformation. I don’t know a lot about this topic but it seems there are not a wide range of models to compare and work off. I guess removing stigma or stereotypes from the debate is a good start toward working out what sort of legislation is needed, and getting a clear picture of the reality of the industry. Which would be difficult to do while it is criminalised, so i guess it is a catch-22 to a certain extent.
My entire argument (and the argument of those who advocate for decriminalisation) has been that the sex industry is perfectly capable of being regulated under existing industrial relations legislation like any other business. Saying it does not need additional regulation is not saying it should be a complete free for all, it’s saying that people’s bodies should not be regulated by criminal codes.
@streamweaver, yes, I am. Although I will admit that I didn’t start off this discussion with that idea clearly formulated in my head. So this has been a useful discussion for me, and I appreciate it.
Also, there are lots of examples of industries where people with no real connection to them comment on how they should be regulated, so I think that even those of us who are not involved in the sex industry have a right to have an opinion on what regulations are needed.
@hexy, I’m sorry that the conversation offended you. As I said, I found it helpful, and I am grateful for that. I do not think I am “whorephobic”, whatever that means, but I do think we have very different approaches to this issue, and probably always will. I will clarify the “product” thing- I am not an economist, but I think that services are considered products. Perhaps we are using the word “product” differently.
That’s stupid.
Even so, I disagree with your premise that the service offered in sex work, being sexual acts (usually), is harmful.
I also think it’s ridiculous that you’ll insist you’re not whorephobic when in the same breath you say you don’t know what the term means.
Late to the party, sorry. I would like to make a point about negative externalities and regulation (I’m also an economist). The presence of a negative externality rarely results in a complete ban of the activity which creates the externality – think about pollution, carbon dioxide, smoking. There are various methods for minimizing the externality – taxes, partial bans, quotas.
One could argue that the ban on much sex work is due to a large perceived negative externality but personally I don’t buy that. I accept that if sex work was regulated on the principles of private and social costs and benefits then legislators might be inclined to go for the extreme case of criminalisation but it’s not inevitable, especially if campaigns to remove the stigma of sex work were successful and if the public had a better understanding of how criminality harms many people.
To reiterate my main point, even if sex work does in some way negatively affect some people, it does not mean that sex work should be banned but it might require regulation to prevent the harms outweighing the benefits. Please note that I haven’t commented on whether there are harms, what they might be, or how a regulator could try to measure/assess them.
Thorn – interesting. I have struggled to find analogies for sex work, as it really is not like any other form of work.
Smoking and gambling are interesting analogies – both are banned from advertising – I would also advocate a ban on advertising sex work. I don’t want to be confronted by images of sex workers in the classifieds of my local paper, and I am even less interested in explaining who they are to my preschooler.
For me the main harm is the enormous social cost and basic inequality of a man being able to easily and legally buy access to a women. I see this as enormously problematic – contributing to the madonna/whore complex some men have, and contributing to the perception that women are not as powerful as men in the office.I also worry about the effects on young women, on their self esteem, and on their expectations of themselves, both body image wise, and of their sexuality.
I find it very sad and a failing of our society that a sex worker might feel that their self esteem has been improved by taking up sex work.
and on legislation and legalisation – legalising sex work does not really seem to prevent many of them problems, at least not in my city. As mentioned a 17 year old girl died of a drug overdose while working in a legal brothel. Or this story from yesterday’s paper about rape within a legal brothel – by the owner/pimp, who may or may not have trafficked the thai woman to be a prostitute in Australia.
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/news/crime-and-law/accused-repeatedly-demanded-sex/2391170.aspx
Sex work is a dirty industry, and I see no point in pretending it is all about happy and articulate women with plenty of other choices. to me that is just as dishonest as insisting that street workers are the only sex workers out there.
I disagree with a number of your comments but i just wanted to make one point quickly. It is that, at least in New Zealand, advertising of gambling is completely legal. I’m sure that is the case in Australia and other places as well.
That article doesn’t say anything about the woman potentially being a trafficking victim. Let me guess: you’ve just decided that, because she’s a Thai sex worker, she couldn’t possibly have been a willing migrant? Congratulations, you’ve bought into racist stereotypes that disempower, stigmatise and discriminate against migrant sex workers, and contribute to them being some of the more marginalised members of the sex worker community. I hope you’re proud of your educated and open minded views.
Why on earth would you find it sad that sex work has improved my self esteem? I bet if I said that sex work had destroyed my self esteem you’d be nodding sympathetically and saying that was the obvious outcome. You just want to hear what you want to hear. Sex work has been great for my self esteem. As an until recently plus size worker, I’ve had to live in a world that tells me my body is disgusting, and having the positive reinforcement of literally hundreds of people find me so attractive that they’re willing to pay me for sexual interaction is a great counter to that. You can dislike it all you want, but many sex workers find sex work a great self esteem and confidence boost, sexually and otherwise.
And great, you’ve found one example of a death and one example of a (reported on) sexual assault (not that I’m claiming that was the only sexual assault that has occurred). Has anyone claimed that decriminalisation will completely eliminate all violence in all workplaces and ensure that no one ever uses drugs in a sex industry workplace? Such a claim would be asinine. But I tell you what: when no one is dying of overdoses or committing sexual assaults outside of sex industry workplaces, we’ll set that as our standard. Until then, we’ll work on minimising exploitation (including by oppressive legislation) and recognise that this is a work in progress and that decriminalisation is not marked a complete failure by one drug overdose, or by the fact that abusive people still commit sexual assault when left in private with vulnerable people they have power over no matter where they are.
Also, please stop setting up strawmen. No one has claimed that the sex industry is “all about happy and articulate women with plenty of other choices”. But you simply can’t make the false claim, as you have here, that sex workers who aren’t miserable don’t exist, or that everyone who does sex work only does it because we have no other choice.
I haven’t had to go searching out these examples – this one is from today’s paper. I took this bit, from yestreday’s article to refer to trafficking:
“In opening submissions from both parties earlier today the jury was told Dick was a friend of the brothel operator.
The office of the Director of Public Prosecutions is set to call evidence suggesting the operator arranged for the alleged victim to come out to Australia and work in the sex industry.”
I haven’t claimed there are no happy sex workers – same as there are happy smokers I suppose. That doesn’t mean I think it is a healthy industry.
The poster at the heart of this discussion aims to promote happy family-oiriented sex workers – nothing anyone has said in this thread has convinced me that it is anything other than a whitewash of a dodgy industry – which was my first thought about it.
Yes, you did. In your very first post you said “But noone has ever met a happy, well balanced sex worker.” With whorephobia that deep, I’m not surprised that the news that sex workers are often normal people with families isn’t making an impact on your bigotry.
Ok – I would amend that to “I have not met a happy well balanced sex worker”. I have met a few who could have been in better places in their lives (none of them street sex workers). IN fact nothing I’ve said has been about street sex workers, or illegal prostitution, despite people having claimed I am only referring to them, and thus to nadir of the industry.
My point really was that all this talk of hypothetical happy family oriented sex workers, who have other choices, yet have chosen sex work, yet should not be discriminated against by having that choice taken away from them, or even criticised, or even discussed by hideous bigots like myself, is very academic ivory tower stuff, and to me, it is a far removed from the real world, and as far from the main thrust of the sex industry as the druggie sex worker straw man that has been presented as representing my arguments.
@seepi – how many sex workers have you met? Under what circumstances?
One was a relative. Two were uni friends (both single mothers), although the sex work came years later, after the drugs, another was a friend’s one-time partner (also a single mother) who was not into drugs, but was not the most stable person I’ve ever met.
So all but one are people I know well – some of them very well. I’m not sure what you are getting at – apart from me!
Two never mention their sex work, and pretend that part of their life never happened. Of them, one of them is now working in an office job, the other is on methodone. One is missing – i think dead. One moved interstate and I think is doing ok.
None of them or their colleagues remotely resembled the normality shown on the poster above.
why?
“Or their colleagues”? How many of these people’s colleagues did you actually meet?
If I were a sex worker who knew you, I wouldn’t out myself either.
I’ve met literally hundreds of sex workers and the numbers of them who are average people, often with families, just doing a job and getting on with their lives is well represented. Many of them don’t announce to everyone in their lives that they’re doing sex work. Why should we? It’s not our job to dispel your stereotypes.
@seepi – I was wondering if your experience was like your psychologist friend who by definition only sees people when they are seeking help, just curious. Sorry if my comment came across as sharp.
Seepi, I find many of the harms you talk about are more likely the result of a sexist society that is terrible at educating its members about sex, relationships, consent and respect. Some elements of the sex industry are also, as far as I can see, caused by these things. But not all. I am also frustrated by only hearing from you about the case where a woman sells sex to a man. It may be the most frequent scenario but other situations exist and are not a negligible part of the industry.
When I say “but not all” I mean not everything is bad and is a product of bad things about our society. I don’t have a problem with people putting a monetary value on sex.
Also as a side note, I noticed the discussion about the “product” of sex work. From am economist’s perspective it is whatever is being directly traded (with the caveat that there may be an untraded
(ack I’m terrible with smart phones, moved to my computer now – sorry!) (sorry for repeating myself)
When I say “but not all” I mean not everything is bad and is a product of bad things about our society. I don’t have a problem with people putting a monetary value on sex. There also may be negative aspects that are caused by other things, like economic inequality.
Also as a side note, I noticed the discussion about the “product” of sex work. From a typical economist’s perspective it is whatever is being directly traded (with the caveat that there may be an untraded externality that may affect those not involved directly in the transaction). In this case the “product” (generally a service – economists generally find no need to distinguish between physical goods and intangible services) would generally seem to be some sort of act or performance by the sex worker, but obviously specifics will vary. The client/customer/consumer/whatever-term-is-most-appropriate may be interested in the service itself or for what the service produces for him/her/hir/preferred-pronoun-here (eg arousal, sexual connection, feelings of intimacy, stress relief).
I think that’s me done.
Thorn: But do you think that definition of “product” is applicable to regulation?
Hexy, after a little research I have found (again, since I realise that I’ve read this before) that quite a lot of sex work is legal in England and Wales. You can’t run a brothel (even if you also work there, as long as you’re involved in the management that’s illegal) and you can’t solicit on the street. I would assume that any pimp type figure is like the brothel situation. In fact one of the UK trade unions has a wing for sex workers (I got this info from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_the_United_Kingdom#Current_laws)
That doesn’t really answer your question. I would definitely say that kind of “product” is applicable to regulation. If we can define it legally we can (attempt to) regulate it. To be honest I can’t imagine any regulations for sex work that are way out from anything we do for other industries.
I see from that wikipedia entry that a “brothel” is defined in the UK as any more than one sex worker working out of the same premises. This kind of legislation serves to isolate sex workers and prevent us working together for increased security, and also works against peer education and networking opportunities that have proven to be amongst the most effective STI and HIV prevention strategies we have. These laws are not in the best interest of sex worker health and safety.
Hexy, I must apologise. Re-reading my comment it was very poorly worded. I meant that any regulations that would be put in place in a situation where we valued and respected the rights of sex workers and their clients (is that the right term?) probably wouldn’t look that different to various kinds of other regulations. I certainly don’t think the current system in the UK is optimal.
I find it barmy that brothels as defined in English law are illegal as they seem much safer, but my opionin is based on very limited knowledge. I am really interested to hear your point of view. In the UK debate about sex work legislation is usually hijacked (unsurprisingly) by people talking exclusively about sex trafficking and forced sex work, which is not helpful.
I’m also interested to hear that compulsory STI testing is not very effective. I gather that most places in the UK will test sex workers for free without judgement. Obviously that should continue if that is the case.
Thorn, my apologies if my post seemed overly aggressive. You’ve been very polite. It’s been a long, frustrating and somewhat painful thread, and I’m finding it a little hard to take new comments in good faith instead of as a continuation of the existing stressful debate.
I don’t believe that brothels are any more or less safe than private escorting, although they can certainly feel that way. I prefer a house because it ‘feels’ more secure, but I’m firmly convinced this is entirely illusory. Some escorts have precautions in place that to increase their security, anyway, such as a ‘safe call’, or using a driver, or doing incalls out of the different rooms in the same hotel used by other workers, or sharing information about dangerous or bothersome clients, or only escorting to hotels and not clients’ private homes. When I did an escorting tour to Darwin, I worked incall out of a hotel room, and actually ended up working illegally because I asked my partner to watch the hotel room door while I saw a client I’d gotten a bit of a weird vibe off over the phone. Having someone take any kind of security role while you’re doing sex work is against the law in the Northern Territory and renders your work a crime, which obviously reduces sex workers’ ability to keep ourselves safe. (The client I was worried about, incidentally, turned out to be fine. He was just a little socially awkward. I was still much more relaxed and able to give a better service knowing that I had a trusted someone keeping an eye on the door from the beginning, instead of having to wait until he convinced me he was trustworthy before I could chill.)
I think it’s currently a global problem that any discussion about sex work gets hijacked to talk about sex trafficking. It’s a harmful conflation that has direct negative impacts on sex worker rights: it leads to an increase in the view of sex workers as victims lacking agency (and especially increases discrimination of migrant sex workers) which encourages people to ignore our voices when we speak on our own behalf. The conflation also promotes the development of restrictive and oppressive policies and legislation that restrict our capacity to work safely and legally. Just as significantly, conflation of sex work and sex trafficking doesn’t actually do anything to help victims of sex trafficking. It doesn’t make it more likely for sex trafficking victims to be identified, it doesn’t make it more likely for the people abusing them to be prosecuted, and it doesn’t rectify all the laws (like the ones in Australia mandating deportation of people alleged to be trafficking victims to be their country of origin unless they give testimony against the accused) that prevent them from returning to a ‘normal’ life once they’ve left the exploitative situation, especially if their desired ‘normal’ life involves continuing to do sex work.
As for testing, free, voluntary, destigmatised, widely encouraged voluntary testing is the best practice model. Victoria, where mandatory testing is a feature of the licensing model, has higher rates of STIs than New South Wales, where testing is voluntary under decriminalisation. All of the statistics I’ve seen on sex worker STI testing in New South Wales under decriminalisation have been encouraging, suggesting sex workers can be trusted to get ourselves tested when it is left in our hands. Our bodies are our business and, when we have strong peer education networks, we know that regular testing is a vital step in keeping those bodies (and those of our clients, partners and lovers) safe and healthy. Voluntary testing allows sex workers to determine when we get tested based on educated assessment of our exposure and risk. A sex worker who sees six clients a shift five shifts a week and does natural oral may assess themselves as needing to get tested more frequently than a sex worker who is only seeing a couple of regulars once or twice a month and providing all services with condoms only, or one who is mostly doing massage and hand relief and only offering full service to selected clients. Sex workers working where testing is voluntary are also encouraged to visit clinics if we have condom breakages, or if we show symptoms of STIs. In places with mandatory testing, the emphasis is placed more on ‘coming in for your certificate’. The focus is on compliance with licensing legislation, not on maintaining or checking on health, meaning that non-compliant (“illegally” working) sex workers may avoid sexual health screening for fear of being reported and prosecuted.
Sex workers in NSW can access STI testing via GPs, or through free STI clinics, some of which target their services at sex workers (one near me has a sex worker only late night clinic night). Testing of sex workers in Victoria is primarily done at specialised clinics, where treatment of sex workers is less than stellar. I have never worked in Victoria (I refuse to be registered like a dog – I know several people who have had real and quite serious negative ramifications come from disclosure of their licensed sex worker status because they have worked in Victoria) but I have heard many horror stories of the sex worker clinics from a huge number of sex workers who have. Sex workers are given less time than ‘civilians’ visiting non sex worker STI clinics, treated rudely, asked invasive questions, and their privacy is routinely violated. I have heard a speaker at a conference suggest that non sex workers should visit a sex worker STI clinic in Melbourne for an STI checkup and say that they are a sex worker if they want to experience a tiny sliver of whore stigma. I’d second that suggestion, but I’m afraid that those clinics give each worker little enough time as it is (swab, needlestick, moralistic glare, tick-the-box) without more people filling them up.
Gee, hex. Bit of a lengthy rant you’ve left in the comment thread, there.
@Cloud – I don’t think hexy has at any point denied that there are issues with the sex industry . I have found that sex workers are very aware of the problems in their industry and that’s why they spend so much time trying to fix them, especially when people who have no experience of the industry but a lot of fixed ideas about it try and implement ‘solutions’ to fix what they perceive to be the problem.
“I know that some women are forced into this work, be it by a lack of other options or actual physical force.” This could also apply to housework, childrearing, low paid jobs to support a family where the father is absent or unwilling to work. But no one is advocating getting rid of families or marriage. We live in a patriarchy, this is how it is.
And where did I advocate getting rid of sex work? I actually think that attempting to do that would be insane and would never work.
I just advocate viewing it as a different sort of job than most others, and that therefore it is not unreasonable for society to treat it differently than other jobs.
But I’m going to bow out of this discussion now. Too many people arguing past each other- when you argue with a position I didn’t actually take, I don’t learn anything.
But treating sex work and sex workers like our job is so different to other jobs leads to criminalisation and licensing models that have negative impacts on our health and safety. Viewing our work as simply work allows it to be legislated under the same laws as govern any other business, which has the best outcomes for sex worker health and safety, and improves our relationships with health service providers and police.
From the other thread, but that’s reached its nesting limit:
“I can think of only one other class of jobs that fall into this category- jobs such as soldier, police office, or fireman.”
There is another rather huge category of non-hazardous jobs that also falls into this category: religious service. Nuns, priests, ministers, imams, monks, and so on. Consider also things like forcing a vegan into abbatoir work, or a strict Muslim into cocktail-mixing, and so on. (A Scientologist into psychiatry?) While I’m completely on board with not forcing anyone into _any_ job, I think the fact that this sort of conscientious-objection clause could so obviously apply to sex work along with a whole lot of other “jobs like any other” makes it really a non-issue.
One example that occurs to me is sweatshops. People are forced to work in them in many countries, no-one is saying that we should get rid of the garment industry though.
It seems to me that the key disagreement is about whether sex work is intrinsically different from all other work, or not. Surely that assessment is up to the individual sex worker?
That is an interesting point. And i think it fits well to some of the points being made about the industry. Some women find they can take on a position of stay at home wife or mother and still retain their sense of identity, their position as a respected equal in the partnership, and their own agency. Others find they take on such a position unwillingly or unhappily due to lack of opportunity, or financial reasons, or by an unequal partnership with a domineering or even abusive spouse. So also the experience may differ significantly with sex work.
It seems to me that there are a few basic tenets to combating the negative effects of living in a patriarchy: support women through their choices, advocate for appropriate change, and constantly work at rejecting the more subtle and insidious form of misogyny or naturalised gender roles. And your point about sex workers understanding the flaws of the industry, and working to remedy them already, is important. I remember when the Northern Territory intervention happened in Australia happened, I had been out of the country since my late teens and was shocked to find such drastic action occurring. Then I remember hearing reports about how long and hard many women from these remote aboriginal communities had campaigned the government to support interventions and programs appropriate to the problem and had been denied and ignored over and over again. I find something of a similarity there in the fact that there was a marginialised group attempting to deal with the issues affecting the group, but had no voice despite solid plans for positive change, and then had to have less effective reforms superimposed on them from a majority responding to misconceptions and misinformation.
My apologies Cloud, I did not mean to infer that you had advocated getting rid of sex work, but my comment was badly written so it did indeed look as if I thought you had said that.
I don’t have an issue with sex work being considered different to most jobs i.e. not losing benefits if you choose not to take up a position at the local brothel. But no one is in danger of that happening. The way sex work is stigmatised is an issue. As I highlighted earlier there are a lot of women forced into things they don’t want to do which are not sex work. So why the stigma specially for sex work? I think it is more about old ideas about women, purity, saving themselves etc than actual on ground reality.
For me my objection is about the objectification of women. Nothing to do with purity, being a prude etc.
Just out of curiosity do you have similar objections to the modelling industry?
Oh absolutely.
Do you advocate for models to be criminalised?
ooh interesting – I’ll have to have a think about that one. But I certainly wouldnt’ mind if the whole industry disappeared.
The Turn Off the Blue Light campaign is a response to a campaign called Turn Off the Red Light, which is a multi-organisation campaign (supported by nonprofits like Ruhama, political parties, etc.) which aims to introduce Swedish-type sex work laws to Ireland i.e.: criminalise buying of sex, not selling, and working to bring cases of sex trafficking to court (current Irish laws on prostitution criminalise advertising or soliciting, but not prostitution itself, as far as I understand).
Like you, sex work is something I have complicated feelings and thoughts about, but I am not sure of the motives of the Blue Light campaign, given it’s spearheaded not by sex workers themselves but by a convicted (former?) pimp+/brother owner Peter McCormick.
Also, as far as I know – and I’m open to correction by someone more informed about the sex work scene in Ireland right now – sex workers’ rights’ organisations like SWAI are not part of the Blue Light campaign though they are against the TORL one.
http://www.sexworkersallianceireland.org/news__events
See I like the sounds of the Swedish laws – prosecute the buyers, not the sellers, and reduce demand. Also they offer the women a lot of rehabilitation. I’m not sure how it is working out in practice though.
In my City (australian capital city) prostitution is legal, and people can advertise legally in the paper etc, so it is very in your face. Being legal seems to mean that the govt can collect a registration fee from brothels, but beyond that they do nothing at all – no inspections, health checks etc, so there seems to be no benefit whatsoever to having legalisation – beyond a list of operating brothels I suppose.
A couple of years ago a 17 year old girl was found dead of an overdose inside a brothel. Even after this no inspections or anything were carried out.
I’m just not convinced that legalising prostitution here has achieved any safety benefits at all.
Sex workers in Sweden report that the Swedish legislation has made sex work more dangerous for them. They have resulted in sex workers losing their houses and custody of their children, and in migrant sex workers being deported. I’ve also heard reports that these much-lauded “rehabilitation” services have simply failed to materialise.
The LASH study in Australia compared three legislative models in three Australian states: decriminalisation in NSW, legalisation/licensing in Victoria, and criminalisation (at the time) in WA. It found that sex workers working under decriminalisation in NSW had the best health and safety outcomes and reported better relationships with police and health service providers.
The ACT has a legislative system that is part way between decriminalisation and legalisation. Some of the industry is decriminalised, some of it are licensed, some small parts are still criminalised.
As hexy says, the benefits of ‘the Swedish model’ may not be that great (Feminist Ire is an Irish blog that has discussed the evidence on that from a pro-legalisation PoV recently). My own morals and icky feelings about treating people as things aside, what I’d like sex work legislation to be about, ideally, is: eliminating sex trafficking, coercion, physical+sexual violence, and unsafe sex. I’m just not convinced (yet) that any model does that, from Swedish to Dutch.
The lack of a good amount of unbiased research on sex work and all the kinds of sex workers doesn’t help, though. Most seems to come from one extreme or another.
Ooh QofT, intriguing. Thanks for the background on the campaign.
QofB sorry, not QofT, get confused by all these queens here.
No worries:) Glad to add to the info about it – I’m Irish, hence the background, but sex work campaigns/laws/regulation etc. is not my area of expertise.
[…] "very good evidence that legalization of prostitution increases human trafficking". Blue Milk also addresses the issue of sex work, provoking an extended conversation in the comments […]
In terms of the latest topic on this thread, while I agree that negative externalities can arise for third parties out of transactions between two other parties, and possibly there is some argument for that in this instance I still think particular attention should be paid to hexy telling some of us that we are exhibiting whorephobia.
Don’t dismiss it, it is too easy for men to dismiss accusations of sexism by women and white people to dismiss those by black people; we need to consider the possibility that maybe some of the same defensiveness and ignorance is happening here in us.
Point taken. But I still don’t know what exactly that term means. So how can I know if I am exhibiting it? If I take it literally, i.e., afraid of whores, I am not. But I suspect there is something more meant. But I also wonder if it is being used to shut me up because she does not agree with my opinion. So call me a name and make me go away. And you know what? It is going to work.
I’d like to point out that I have tried very hard to stay civil and respectful, when I am not exactly getting that vibe back. I haven’t called anyone any names or said anywhere near the horrible things that hexy has attributed to me.
I don’t actually know if I think that there are any valid concerns from the rest of society- we never got to the point that we could discuss that, because we spent several days arguing over whether we could even consider the possibility- and as far as I can read her last comment, she still does not concede that point.
So I think I’m done here, too. I learned a lot, but sadly, mostly because writing the comments made me think through my opinions. I think there was a lot more I could have learned from hexy, but she was not inclined to discuss that with me- which is of course her right.
Pointing out that someone is exhibiting bigotry and privilege (which is what whorephobia is) is not “calling them a name”, any more than calling someone out on racism, sexism or homophobia is name calling.
You’re pulling a tone argument: the uppity sex worker should have been nicer when pointing out that your arguments and the things you were advocating were oppressive and prejudiced.
@Cloud – it is great that you have thought through your opinions, but your comment reads, to me, as though you expected Hexy to educate you about her views and that you are disapppointed that she chose not to do this, which you have noted is her right. Can I respectfully point out that you are just one of many many people that expect Hexy to do this every time she defends her work, and perhaps a little bit of Googling and reading might have helped you understand her position without putting the onus on someone else to explain it to you?
I really don’t understand why everyone is being so hard on Cloud. Her comments seem quite measured, reasonable and respectful to me whereas Hexy does seem to be calling whorephobia as a way of silencing those who disagree with her. Surely if it is like any other profession then she needs to be a bit more robust when faced with criticisms rather than calling privilege and bigotry when faced with them. To this extent, I disagree with aligning criticism of sex work with sexism and racism. If sex work is a free choice as Hexy says it is, then you take whatever comes with those choices.
In any event, if criticising sex work is exhibiting privilege then isn’t that just a concession that those who are engaged in sex work aren’t privileged? If it is the case that most people in sex work aren’t privileged then I think that calls for a valid criticism of the profession (or the power imbalances involve in it).
@Mindy: that googling comment is quite patronising. It does seem that Hexy was trying to educate people. Isn’t why she was taking the time to respond? There are lots of occasions when people engaging in conversation on the internet where they could have found an “answer” via google.
@hexy, I wouldn’t have mind your tone if you actually argued with my points.
When I tell someone I think they are sexist, I usually say why- otherwise, why bother? The person won’t learn anything. You have several times told me that I am whorephobic without saying why. Now you say that means I am bigoted and privileged, but don’t bother explaining why. Throwing around labels like that without explaining what I have said that indicates I deserve that label is pointless.
Why does the fact that I chose a different career than you make me privileged if indeed your career is freely chosen? I’ll cop to a lot of privilege, but I’m not so sure about this one.
Frankly, it seems to me that the position here is that only a sex worker is allowed to express her opinion. Or, if a non sex worker has an opinion, it is only acceptable if a sex worker says it is. Being a sex worker doesn’t make hexy wrong or immoral. But it also doesn’t make her right, and acting like it does seems to me to be a step away from the equal treatment hexy says she wants. I argue with equals when I disagree with them or when I think I can learn from their opinions.
As for expecting hexy to take the time to educate me- I expected her to either respond to my points or not respond at all, which is what I expect anyone in an online discussion to do. And yes, I hoped to learn something. Why would I bother participating in such an extended discussion about a topic I said from the start I didn’t know that much about if I didn’t hope to learn something? Surely this is not hexy’s first day on the internet- I have a hard time believing that my behavior was a surprise.
The sad thing, hexy, is that I probably agree with roughly 90% of your opinion. I don’t think you should be stigmatized regardless of what sort of sex work you do, and I am fine with the idea of decriminalizing prostitution. I just think that there is a possibility that the product of your work might reasonably be said to harm someone else, and if that turns out to be the case, that everyone in society has a right to have an open debate and decide how to regulate the industry so as to balance the benefits you perceive with the harms others perceive. The fact that you could take someone who started from that point of almost agreement and so completely alienate her that she will never again participate in such a conversation- well, in my opinion that doesn’t bode well for your chances of convincing people like Seepi, who I also think got some unfairly rough treatment in this thread. Again, that is completely your right. But I offer this observation as something you might want to think about if your goal really is to convince people over to your point of view.
This entire experience leaves a sour taste in my mouth, so I think this will be my last comment here. Thanks, Jen, for being willing to defend me a bit. Perhaps I am just once again being reminded that I don’t really belong on feminist blogs.
Very well said. Sorry I couldn’t defend you more. Like I said, I agree with basically everything you have said. I didn’t have the energy to respond after also being called whorephobic. Like you, I probably also agree with a lot of what Hexy thinks too but felt quite alienated by the end.
Sex workers are oppressed by stigma and discriminated against by a whorephobic society even if we freely choose our careers. And that’s the most basic sex work 101 statement I can think of, so I’m absolutely boggling that you need it explained to you. Is this really such complicated stuff? You are privileged over sex workers because you do not have to live with the whore stigma.
You’ve basically pulled the “well, you’d only be under privileged if there was actually something wrong with it” argument. By that argument, where’s the underprivilege in being queer? It’s in the stigma and discrimination. Privilege isn’t all about economics.
Cloud, you keep presenting regulation of the sex industry like it’s this tiny little point I should just concede on, and I keep pointing out that what you are talking about is a violation of sex worker human rights. I am not going to accept that we should throw sex workers under the bus and treat us like criminals undeserving of human rights because you’ve decided that our work “harms” people who are completely unconnected to it, and that those mythical people are somehow more important than us. That’s whorephobic.
I can’t really accept that any criticism of sex work in any form is unacceptable whorephobia.
Good thing no one has asked you to.
I’m just going to repeat one of blue milk’s earlier comments here:
“hexy – this thread is straying into lots of sex work 101 stuff.. your participation is very much appreciated but I can understand if at some point soon it is too frustrating/tiring to continue.”
It is 101 – you can find it on google so you don’t have to ask for a personal explanation. As I said, hexy has to defend her job everyday. Educate yourself. hexy does not owe you an explanation. It is not her job to convince you. Maybe you will never be convinced. Why do you feel she owes you an explanation?
@seepi – where has anyone said that any criticism of sex work in ‘any form’ is whorephobia? I think you are reading things into hexy’s and others comments that are not there.
People are accusing hexy of somehow damaging their lives because she does sex work, I’m not sure how and I’m not convinced they are either, but nothing she can do convinces them. Maybe it’s living in a patriarchy that is more the issue here and that sure as hell isn’t hexy’s fault.
She doesn’t owe us an explanation but she did choose to come on here and talk about what she does. So I don’t think it is unreasonable to expect her not to be so defensive when someone presents an opposing view.
Noone is accusing Hexy personally of damaging their lives. We have been pointing out that the profession can damage lives. There is a a difference. And it does.
It seems like there is a hell of a lot of word twisting in this thread.
And nothing reeks of privilege more than a bunch of middle class women showing how liberal they are by saying that criticism of sex work is patriarchal, close-minded etc. I’d like to hear from the drug-addicted woman who is currently standing on the street down the road from our flat and hear whether she’d like to be out in freezing Oxford winter selling her body to a stranger or maybe doing something else.
And can I just asked what the sex work 101 stuff was that we were asking Hexy to explain? I thought the points raised were nuanced with quite complicated answers. It seemed to me that Hexy was the one putting a simplistic spin on things. ie: I choose to do sex work and am fine with it therefore all sex work is completely fine.
‘I choose to do sex work and am fine with it therefore all sex work is completely fine.’ Hexy did not at any point say that. If you want to know why sex workers defend their work, go to their blogs and read about it. Read comment threads where sex work has been attacked and they are there time and time again explaining, defending, trying to get their point across. Have you ever gotten tired of explaining something to someone?
The difference between street sex workers and sex workers making their own free choice has been explained many times on this thread. Please don’t continue to conflate the two. Hexy and others have said several times that on-street sex workers are not the whole of the industry and also that the sex industry itself is trying to make things better for all workers and give them choices. Also, it is not because the sex industry exists that that drug addicted woman is working on the street. What would you have her do, starve? Fall back on some non existent safety net?
“I choose to do sex work and am fine with it therefore all sex work is completely fine.”
If that’s how you interpreted what I wrote, then you have trouble with reading comprehension. And incidentally, I’m not middle class. I’m extremely working class.
Many street based sex workers also make their own free choice to do sex work… but yes, street based sex workers are a tiny minority of the industry, and do experience the most marginalisation, making them a poor example when they’re held up to represent everyone doing sex work.
Just because you don’t think it is 101 doesn’t mean that it’s not. Just because you haven’t seen these arguments before doesn’t mean that they haven’t been played out time and time again.
yeah, well a lot of things that you discuss on here are 101 to me. How would you feel if I told you to go google it?
I would go and google it ffs. I have no problem with being told that my knowledge of something is basic and that google awaits. I want to learn and I’m quite happy to educate myself by looking it up. One of the first things I learnt was that people on the internet are not there to educate me, are not my learning experience.
what the sex work 101 stuff was
Street based workers are not the whole of the sex industry
drug addiction correlation=/=causation – do you know if they were drug addicted before they started sex work, are all sex workers on drugs?
Drug use is not confined solely to the sex industry – more hospitality workers use drugs than any other industry – as someone who briefly worked in the hospitality industry I can well understand why
mental health issues correlation=/=causation
sex workers and their supporters are well aware of problems in the industry and they are working to make things better -see Scarlet Alliance http://www.scarletalliance.org.au/
The Swedish model – isn’t working
Links: (NB: links use outdated language including prostitution)
Click to access 160305LLVortrag_Eriksson.pdf
Click to access Don_Kulick_on_the_Swedish_Model.pdf
thorn – good work on the clarification of externalities, thanks. Also, a kinky sex feminist economist? Wow.
Hehe, thanks. I’m hoping to write my PhD thesis on social norms and intrahousehold allocation of different types of labour – we’ll see how that goes.
I enjoyed writing that post on externalities far too much, I reckon UG teaching beckons…
I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts about an analogy with gambling? It seems to me that it is widely accepted that gambling can be very harmful in certain circumstances. However, is most places it is not banned and gambling workers receive the same rights and protections as other workers. Instead, the industry is regulated in various ways in an attempt to minimise the harms. It seems to fit into thorn’s analysis.
gambling advertising is banned or heavily regulated in australia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling_advertising
Hi seepi, your comment only just turned up. Thanks for that. I take it you are responding to my earlier comment. In NZ certain kinds of gambling are allowed, and advertising of those kinds is regulated by an advertising and marketing industry body.
I have done a quick search and see that certain types of advertising is permitted in Australia, eg for footy betting and lotteries.
Yes and no. As far as something we see as “adult entertainment” that can be potentially harmful to the adults involved then yes. Although I would argue that in gambling the “consumer” risks harm while for sex work it is the worker/producer who is more likely to be harmed, and that this different allocation of risks (of harm – not the risk/chance involved in each gamble) means the markets function very differently.
I don’t know stats about gambling addiction problems, but on the surface in the UK it looks like things are managed fairly well – you can opt to bar yourself from any gambling website or casino and there is lots of information available in casinos on how to get help. I think the staff also get training on addiction so they can recognise it and help where possible.
Regulations to protect sex workers, their clients and those who might experience externalities from the industry would be best designed on consultation with those in or connected to the industry.
I seriously think that most problems that people tend to associate with the sex industry actually are caused by other things in society – economic inequality, sexism, lack of opportunity, abuse.
I agree with pretty much everything in your statement but I think that the analogy stands even though there is a difference allocation of risks of harm. There are other industries where there is more risk to the worker than the customer (the mining industry is extremely dangerous) so why do people pick on sex workers? Because it is largely viewed by society as a special category of activity.
I don’t know very much about mining regulations so I’m not sure about what would be applicable. As far as picking on sex work, I imagine it’s due to our weirdly prudish obsession with sex and a large dose of misogyny. Also no one really seems to care about male sex workers. My only info about male sex workers is from when male evangelical Christianity get caught with them in the US!
We don’t make miners register with the police, for example, which sex workers have to do in some jurisdictions. Registration is permanent, sometimes lasting even after death. We don’t have the equivalent of mandatory testing for any other profession, which is in place in many areas even after it’s been repeatedly shown not to work to decrease STIs and to have poor compliance rates. Mandatory testing is a violation of sex worker human rates. The best health and safety outcomes come from promoting a culture of voluntary testing through peer education networks.
Arg, rights, not rates. Got my rant on and forgot how to type!
Hexy, I find your points interesting but I was thinking more of a case of what we could move towards. The problems with the current system seem, to me, relatively straightforward to identify (unless you have a very specific agenda that’s anti-sex work), but I’m curious about a legal environment that produces positive outcomes so I’d like to find out what should change, not just in terms of removing regulations and laws that causes problems now, but what could be introduced to add protections. I’m sorry if I’m barking up the wrong tree. I’ve tried to do a bit of research online for proposed policies but haven’t come across much apart from decriminalisation and enforcing workers’ rights (both labour specific and human rights).
I don’t really think mining is a good example because in mining you have big employers to take responsibility for site safety and insurance (not that they always do, especially in developing countries). Big employers can write contracts which include them being liable for health costs and payouts to families in case of serious injury or death. How would that work for a self-employed sex worker? I don’t have stats (google isn’t being very forthcoming) but I imagine the vast majority of sex workers are self employed, working through agencies or independently. Any info on this would be appreciated if possible.
In Australia, there are two major reforms that sex worker activists are calling for to be implemented in all states and territories: decriminalisation of the sex industry, and introduction of anti-discrimination legislation covering sex workers. We already have anti-discrimination legislation in a couple of states, some on the basis of occupation and some on the basis of “legal sexual activity”. The systems in place aren’t perfect, as we’ve seen from a recent state in Queensland where a sex worker bringing a discrimination complaint against a motel owner resulted in a precedent being set where any motel owner who has a liquor license in the rooms can essentially refuse accommodation to sex workers, despite this being explicitly forbidden under the Anti-Discrimination legislation, but simply having those laws put in place in the first place is a start. It gives us somewhere to go, and it makes a statement to authorities and the general public that sex workers have a reasonable expectation of being treated like any other human being. We’ve had better success in Tasmania, where anti-discrimination legislation was used to mandate the removal of whorephobic anti sex work newspaper advertisements placed by a (I believe) Christian organisation. The organisation was required to print an apology. They have since, however, published a second lot of ads with more whorephobic and discriminatory slogans, and I believe another complaint either has been made or is about to be made. In states where there is no anti-discrimination legislation, sex workers often have no legal recourse against actions like these.
The enforcement of labour and human rights is another vital area sex workers work towards. There’s a bit of a mess around official unionising for sex workers, both in Australia and overseas, but there are plenty of non-union sex worker organisations (many of which are completely peer run) fighting for sex worker rights. Sex workers and sex worker organisations are involved in pushing for legislative change on a variety of fronts as well as in such more high-visibility areas like raising visibility of sex worker issues, providing services to sex workers, or conducting media campaigns, and sex worker organisations often advocate for and provide advice to sex workers who are experiencing violations of their labour rights. I guess the main point is that legislation that supports sex worker labour rights is not necessarily sex worker specific legislation. I’m aware of several sex workers who are involved in the labour rights movement in a non sex work specific context (some are out as sex workers, but not specifically working on these projects in the context of being sex workers) but who are very much working with the understanding that the reforms that they are working towards will benefit a range of workers, including sex workers. As sex workers are not a completely unique case existing in isolation to other workers, not all reforms that affect us need to be sex work specific. We can benefit from reforms aimed at broader industries that can be interpreted to include sex workers.
That’s not to say that there should be no sex work specific work done in the areas of labour rights and human rights policy development, of course. But a lot of the work takes place in a broader context. Sex work specific stuff, when done by sex worker organisations, also tends to involve a lot of community consultation, which means it’s a slow and not very visible process. For example, there’s currently some debate in Australia about whether or not sex worker organisations should be pushing for a minimum wage for sex workers who are employees. The consultation process for this one has been going on for a while and has fierce advocates on both sides. As the primary organisation doing the consultation is a peer organisation working for the interests of workers, it’s working very hard to ensure that all viewpoints are represented and that the final decision is an accurate reflection of what the sex worker community wants, whilst not marginalising further the more marginalised members of that community.
I don’t have any stats on sex worker self employment, but in my personal experience sex workers who are self employed are well represented in Australia. The entire sector of the industry we call private workers work for themselves, which includes incall and outcall escorts and workers who have their own premises. Street based sex workers tend to be self employed (the “pimp” figure is almost unheard of in Australia). There’s also a wide swath of the industry who work for a house/brothel or escort agency, but aren’t employees. I’m in this category: I’m technically a contractor, and as such my “boss” cannot dictate when I work, how much I charge, or what services I offer. Were she to change my status to that of an employee, I would technically be eligible for entitlements like superannuation payments and holiday pay, but she would be able to dictate these terms. There is a bit of a trade off in rights: I currently do not have some that would definitely be benefits, but I have some things I consider to be important freedoms. I would certainly like paid vacation days (I barely knew what to do with myself when I first started getting them at straight jobs!) and the lack of super for many workers is just one factor that makes sex work not the most retirement-focused occupation for most sex workers who don’t take matters into their own hands. But I would be extremely uncomfortable doing sex work in a situation where a boss could tell me what services to provide or how much to charge, and being able to set my own hours is important to me both as someone living with disability and someone who works other jobs and fits sex work around them. If I were to work for someone who gave me employee status, it would be extremely important to me my employer guaranteed not to dictate these terms even though they had the right to. I don’t know how many would agree to that.
To be realistic, however, I know of far more sex workers who are considered employees and whose employers set their terms of work who do not receive these entitlements than I know of sex workers who are receiving super payments or vacation days. (Please note: Anecdata only. There may well be a number sex workers working for brothels or agencies in Australia who are receiving these things that I just haven’t encountered.) Enforcement of the labour rights sex workers have won is a slow process. Stigma plays a part in preventing sex workers from accessing these rights, to an extent: to begin with, many sex workers are unaware of their legal entitlements, because sex work is stigmatised and not discussed in the same contexts that other work is discussed and information on sex work not made freely available. Sex workers are also in a position where our needs for privacy and the steps we take to protect those needs (such as not giving employers our birth names, or keeping our sex work status hidden from friends and family) may get in the way of defending labour rights, especially if outside assistance, consultation or involvement of authorities or regulating bodies is involved. Work here is needed to further destigmatise the industry to ensure workers can feel safe in accessing services and support for labour rights, as well as information on rights when first entering the industry. Sex worker organisations need to be supported and funded to advocate on sex workers’ behalves when our strong needs for privacy and unwillingness to subject ourselves to society’s stigma prevents us from engaging in labour rights and human rights processes that may result in outing.
Very out of my depth here as a twentysomething male who has never commented on the issue and who stumbled across this blog quite by accident.
That being said, I feel like this comment thread could have been a whole lot more interesting had both sides not repeatedly missed the point of the other. In fact, that this debate ended up having sides at all is probably the root of its failure.
I find when it comes to just about any aspect of society, no matter how small, it is useful to think the exact opposite of Occam’s Razor. The situation is always infinitely more complicated and nuanced than any inside information or research suggests. The base position in my opinion should always be to assume that any study or belief that leads one to come to a definite conclusion is wrong.
Applying this theory (without any prior knowledge mind; I am not an expert on the sex industry and would not even consider myself informed on the matter) to sex work suggests a number of things. That there are plenty of well-balanced, free individuals who find their chosen profession empowering; there are many people who find sex work their only option due to factors such as drug use and violence; that in many instances sex work does not contribute negatively to society; that there are many instances when negative externalities are created by sex work. And so on.
So hexy, you’re right. Sex work is obviously stigmatised by society when in many cases it is a profession that women enter into of their own volition and which has no overall negative impact on society. However, in many cases sex work is not entered into willingly and results in the creation of negative externalities.
I have already admitted that I know nothing about the industry and found this blog post by accident, not by searching for anything to do with sex work or feminism. From my admittedly poorly informed perspective, I believe that blue milk’s original ‘war on drugs’ analogy was accurate in terms of the demonization of both sets of experiences by those not-involved which leads to a public perception of both industries which is significantly skewed. I believe that both industries have negative and positive aspects for participants like any other industry. If drugs didn’t feel great, millions of people wouldn’t do them! If sex work wasn’t in some cases empowering, women wouldn’t enter into it freely! I believe that the largest negative externality created in both cases is crime, and that the crime network that supports and profits from the drug and sex industries could be massively reduced by decriminalisation and regulation.
Lastly, I also believe from what I have read here that Sweden’s laws on sex work are condescending more than anything. The fact that they obviously condemn the sex trade by criminalizing buyers, while at the same time not criminalizing sellers seems to suggest that they view all sex workers as victims who had no choice. This seems to me very disingenuous, and patronizing to those sex workers who made conscious decision to enter into the trade, Sweden’s laws shouldn’t be seen as in any way progressive. I think they should be seen as inherently muddled and more than a little sexist. If you condemn the sex trade on (very shaky) moral grounds, then fine, condemn the sex trade and criminalize all those who partake in it. Truly progressive regulation would acknowledge both the benefits and the problems with the sex trade, and work to enhance the former and eradicate the latter.
Apologies is this is all ‘sex work 101’. That is very much my level of knowledge on the subject, but I felt compelled to comment regardless. Thanks.
I thought this might be relevant to recent discussions
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2011/12/04/what-is-a-representative-sex-worker/
I’ve been following that as well. Pretty frustrating to read.
I ask that the Irish government only legalize independents! I feel that legalizing brothels/agencies/madames would maximise trafficking and it would send out the wrong message to the world……..ONLY LEGALIZE INDEPENDENTS!
I’ve been in the industry since 2005, I have no mental illnesses and really enjoy exercise and studying. This job is the longest job I’ve had, regular jobs are boring and repetitive. I have had the chance to meet many men from all walks of life, I am their “go to” girl for companionship, advice and romance. Many reviews of me out there and I love hearing what they say, it’s a real job!
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I feel that many of the commenters that are arguing against this don’t realize that sex work doesn’t necessarily mean prostitution. I am a sex worker. I work on the internet as a cam model and you know what? 90% of the people that come into my chat room are nicer and more accepting than the people commenting on this. I have never had sex with someone for money, I have never physically touched any of the people that provide my income as a sex worker, and you know what I’ve never even seen their faces, known their names, or heard their voices. I am an extremely spiritual person, practicing yoga, meditation, and unconditional love. I like to believe I am a balanced and happy person. Being a sex worker has not damaged me, it has given me freedom and made me feel more open about myself. I make my own hours, I can make hundreds of dollars in a few hours without ever leaving my house, an showered with compliments, gifts, and support. It’s a great choice for me. SEX WORK =/= PROSTITUTION.
[…] Milk explains how she, as an outsider, views sex worker experiences by analogy with drug culture experiences ranging from very negative to very positive. (This post is […]