Dear Abby,
"I do not profess to be an expert on the subject, and I am not extremely knowledgeable about the minutiae of laws surrounding prostitution"
It would be a good idea to familiarize yourself with the laws you're calling unworkable before passing judgment on their effectiveness. You should especially educate yourself about the many successes of Sweden’s approach to prostitution compared to the many failures of legalization and decriminalization. The Netherlands has around twice as many inhabitants as Sweden but the scale of prostitution is ten times Sweden’s. A good summary can be read here:
http://sisyphe.org/article.php3?id_article=2035 “procuring sex for cash has a strong historical precedent, and will never be completely eradicated.”
The same is true for all crimes. Has a law ever completely eradicated any particular type of power abuse? Child pornography is a 3 billion dollar a year industry in the United States alone.
However, there is nothing that supports your assertion that the number of men who pay for sex has remained static over the years or is not highly subject to regional and national differences. In Britain, the number of men paying for sex nearly doubled from 5.6% in 1995 to 9% in 2005, but in Thailand 80% of men say they have paid for sex. If the number of British men using prostitutes can double in ten years then it can also half in ten years because what goes up can go down.
Personally, I do not agree that prostitution is rape, which is the way you refer to the practice throughout your message.
Most prostituted women, men and transgendereds disagree with you that the experience of prostituting is dissimilar to the experience of rape and since almost all prostitutes have been raped either children and/or in prostitution I’d say they’ve got a good grip on what rape feels like when comparing it to their prostitution. 90% of prostitutes say they want out of prostitution immediately. One 5-country study of 475 prostitutes found 92% said they wanted out, and a 9-country study of 854 prostitutes found 89% wanted out immediately.
“there are a few who choose to
join escort agencies and the likes (Bell du Jour, for example)”
Why put the capitalist rights of a very few privileged women to make more money (all your examples are of white, middle class women with book deals) above the rights of the much more numerous prostituted, trafficked, enslaved women and girls (the average age of entry into prostitution is 13) to not be raped repeatedly every day, day after day? Surely the right to be free from rape outweighs a contended, healthy and happy woman’s right to profit from a system of gender, race, and nationality exploitation.
In the 50's and 60's some black business owners organized against desegregation knowing once black people could freely choose to shop and eat at white-owned businesses they would no longer be forced to buy from black-owned businesses and profits would drop. They lost their fight to keep a personally profitable result of social inequality intact and racial equality has moved ahead because of it. The sexual capitalists will ultimately lose their fight to hold back progress in prostituted women's sexual autonomy.
I think it’s idealistic to assume that those men who are obviously morally deficit in the first place to even consider using women in the most degrading way in return for cash will be deterred from continuing to do so by an amendment to the law.
I agree that laws are not enough. We already have laws against rape, kidnapping and murder. However, Sweden’s experience backs up what many studies have found to be the most effective deterrents for predatory men, and it is not legal statutes but the jail time, fines, and public exposure as a man who pays for sex gets under those statutes. One study confirming that prostituting men’s demands are very influenced by the threat of punishment:
A Large Specific Deterrent Effect of Arrest for Patronizing a Prostitute
http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArt ... ne.0000060 “Are there not some parts of Europe (Germany and
Amsterdam I believe) where prostitution has been legalised, and women are privileged to the same regulations concerning work as women in more traditional roles?
You are incorrect about that. It is a common misconception.
It is estimated 80-90% of prostitutes in The Netherlands are not Dutch. After the Netherlands legalized the sex industry it grew overall by 25% and trafficking to the Netherlands increased to meet increased men’s demands. Wherever prostitution is legalized child prostitution has increased and street prostitution remained as dangerous and organized-crime controlled as ever because pimps lose nothing by keeping “their girls” out of brothels and gain more money from men willing to pay for condomless, violent, underaged sex.
It is Amsterdam, not Stockholm, that has shut down red light districts and window brothels because they multiplied underground prostitution and produced a spike in gang activity and prostituted slavery via trafficking to meet men's increased, legitimized demands for sex on command.
“I am yet to see any empirical evidence that this will work otherwise.”
The Netherlands has around twice as many inhabitants as Sweden but the scale of prostitution is ten times Sweden’s. Trafficking into Sweden has reduced dramatically, street prostitution is down with no evidence of an unusual increase in off-street prostitution, and many prostituted women, some estimates put it at 60% of Sweden’s prostitutes, have come forward to take advantage of social service exit and healthcare programs. There is more where that came from.
At least women in this judicial system are receiving payment for what they do, because in all likelihood if men in Norway are to face prosecution for using prostitutes, they WILL begin to rape women.
How would you react if a man said to you that he wanted to pay you $100 for sex and if you refused he would rape you anyway? Would you say, “Well okay, since you put it that way, let’s get it on”? That is no kind of consent to prostitution.
After all, they will be receiving their sexual gratification regardless
Just as feminists have argued with regards to rape, prostitution is minimally about sex and more about power abuses. Hugh Grant could have 10 free blowjobs every day by beautiful women because he’s handsome, rich and a celebrity, but he didn’t even pay for a high-priced call girl, he desired a drug-addicted street prostitute to suck his dick. Power, not sexual gratification.
and if they don’t pay then they can’t be prosecuted, since technically they’ve not used a prostitute, but rather had sex with a ‘consenting’ adult.
You’re very wrong about this. If during a rape trial the man says the woman was a prostitute he paid, his chances of getting convicted GO DOWN, not up as you imply the evidence of money would bring. This is why men often rape and then say it was consented to as sexual transaction- because it works to get them off the rape charges. Currently the woman being branded a whore is considered more detestable than a man using economic coercion to prey upon vulnerable women. The Swedish model works against the stigma prostitutes face because it reinforces that the power difference between punters and prostitutes makes the man culpable and the woman a victim of impoverished circumstances. Less blame on women, more on men is the idea.
The more you falsely insist there are large numbers of happy women who willingly prostitute, the more you reinforce the common “she’s a ho who wanted it” defense rapists are using to great effect. It also reinforces golddigger stereotypes about women using sex and lies to get money from ‘innocent’ men, exactly what rapists claim has happened to them by the women they rape and then call lying whores who wanted the ‘sex’.
If the police had kept a log of the women on the street, and worked to protect them…
If police were tracking and logging the men who use prostitutes it would go much further in reducing violence against them since they would lose the anonymity that benefits punters even in places where it is legal.
The number of illegal brothels in the Netherlands has increased dramatically since prostitution was legalised.
http://www.radionetherlands.nl/currenta ... ed061031mcProstitutes consent to sex for cash, whether being forced to owing to financial circumstances or not.
Again I ask to think how you would respond to the offer of the would-rape-you-anyway punter above. That’s not “consenting” to sex, that’s giving in to a threat, and sex procured by coercion or threat is called rape.
Many appropriate this as their profession.
I have never seen evidence of this claim, and believe me I have looked. I offer to donate $100 to the sex worker charity of your choice if you can show me any proof that “many appropriate this as their profession.” Most emphatically do not.
In the USA, 56% of prostituted persons don't want prostitution legalized as a job.
South Africa: 62%
Thailand: 72%
Turkey: 96%
Zambia: 92%
Canada: 68%
Colombia: 80%
Mexico: 49%
59% of German prostitutes interviewed did not think their country’s legalization of prostitution has made them safer from rape and physical assault.
the concept of prostitution and the women who do this have long been accepted as being a marginal niche of society, whereas paedophiles and those conducting inc*stuous relationships are not.
Did you know that the Netherlands recently approved a political party, The Charity, Freedom and Diversity (NVD) party, whose goal is to lower the age of consent to 12, legalize child pornography and sex with animals? "A ban just makes children curious,"
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/outcry ... 92681.htmlThe point is that just because something is socially or politically accepted does not make it good for women. Slavery, segregation, lack of women’s suffrage, and a host of other civil right abuses were all considered normal until people challenged what normal means and redefined it. I would like you to be a part of making that change instead of digging your heels in to support a thousand year old legacy of men controlling women’s sexuality with their economic and social power over women.
You remark of the buying of sex that “it is not done in secret wholly between sophisticated criminal networks who can operate entirely out of public view.” But, apart from the reference to sophistication, I would say that it is. There are no TV advertisements EXPLICITLY offering sex, and we don’t get leaflets through the door.
I think this is a disingenuous argument considering that phone books and the most popular print and internet media contains entire pornstitution sections and websites. There are no tv advertisements offering cigarettes either but that doesn’t mean people don’t know where to get cigarettes. There is no feminism section in the Daily Sport like there is a prostitute-finding section.
The man who uses a prostitute is stereotyped as
affluent, morally flawed and someone who abuses power, and there are not many who would admit to possessing these personal attributes. And as long as prostitutes are not spoken about, or acknowledged in mainstream conversation then for the majority they may as well not exist
You switched subjects midstream.
First you start out saying that men don’t openly speak of their prostitution use, which is true but becoming less so as men are emboldened to feel good about themselves, like good feminists ‘helping’ women even, when they choose to prostitute.
Then you switched that to “prostitutes” not being spoken about even though you list several books among many of happy hookers telling their sexy if sometimes melancholy tales and there are entire tv programs like “The Girls Next Door” and “Cathouse” showing the less than 10% of prostituted women who do not say they want out of prostitution immediately.
the mythical femme-fatale stereotype who allure middle-class men away from their wives with the promise of erotic delights, when the reality is considerably less glamorous.
Yet that is the stereotype Belle du Jour and Kate Holden give support to among their readers. 60% of johns are married men and 85% have long term sex partners. Tossing in one or two unsavory anecdotes to stories mostly meant to sexually titillate and legitimize men’s rights to demand sex from women anytime does nothing to demolish that stereotype. In fact, as with rape trials, legitimized prostitution has only made wives and girlfriends blame prostituted women more for ‘messing with’ their men than they blame the man for seeking the prostitute out for paid sex. When has the legitimacy of being a wife ever stopped men from raping, punching and murdering women as you seem to think legitimacy will stop men from doing these things to prostitutes? Accounts of wives being raped by husbands are taken less serious than stranger rapes and accounts of prostitutes being raped by johns are the same.
Prostituted women have been focused on whole lotsa bunches. Think of how pornography broken down means “writings on whores” but there’s no common word for writings about wives or mothers (wifography, materography) or writings about any other female-dominated work (secretarography, nurseography, midwifeography, etc.) We’ve got oodles of pornography and we’re long overdue for serious contributions to johnography.
it’s human nature to deny knowledge of that we know to be wrong and did nothing about
Sweden has not swept prostitution under the rug but dragged it out into the open in a way no other country has done, looking at it from how prostituted women see it ((harmful, humiliating, violent) instead of how men experience it (harmless, entertaining, pleasurable).
but I DID remark in my blog that if Norway is proposing to illegalise the buying of sex, they need to introduce other initiatives to support and allow women to make money in other ways. I will quote the section from my article here; “What the government is proposing to do is to punish men who attempt to buy sex on the street, but they are not additionally suggesting the implementation of social reforms and financial support to help the women who are selling sex for cash.”
I’m sorry but I really do not believe the statement of fact you wrote implies that you would support implementing social reforms. Your opinion is left out entirely until later when you call the whole premise of telling men to stop paying for sex unfeasible. If men having as many prostitutes, strippers and pornography as they can afford was a workable rape reduction strategy then why are prostitutes the most raped women in the world? According to your theory, prostitutes shouldn't be raped when they consent to sex for money and yet men feel entitled to rape prostitutes more than they rape anyone else. How do you reconcile that with your belief that giving men the hookers they want will make them rape hookers less?
“why should young girls and women, who already comprise one of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged facets of society, be futher burdened and affected by the introduction of a law professing to forward ‘women’s rights?’
Because 90% of prostituted people say they want out of prostitution immediately when asked “What do you need?” by researchers in 9 countries. As comments about the research into john behavior states, prostituted women overwhelmingly call themselves what men call them, whores and hoes. The term “sex worker” is a top-down phrase invented by pornography spokespersons and not a grassroots, bottom-up term prostituted women use themselves.
Why do you think threats of increased violence should give men whatever they want when it comes to prostitution but not to abortion rights? I believe threats to rape women more if men's whores are denied to them is an inexcusable terrorism.
“the validity of any empirical data collected in relation to this would be questionable.”
All research is questionable, but when EVERY piece of research done on prostitution over the past century shows the same conclusion- women desperately don’t want to be prostituted but aren’t free to choose otherwise- that really says something.
“If it’s going to happen, as it will, why not make it easier for the women”
You mean if rape is inevitable learn to lie back and get something good out of it, like money? I reject caving in to men's terrorist threats to hurt women more if society doesn't back the fuck off and let them do as they wish to prostitues.
who feel they have to do it, rather than trying to make some big ‘supposedly’ feminist statement about women’s rights?
It is prostituted women themselves who say they want out of prostitution. Upwards of 90% of them say it while I think you would find it very hard to accurately say 90% of feminists want the Swedish model implemented. Have you read Bust, Bitch, Venus, Scarlet, Alternet, Feministing, Pandagon, etc? Lots more of them pro-john feminists than Twisty Fasters, so please don’t tell me the idea that most prostituted women want out of prostitution and not better whoring conditions comes from feminists and not prostitutes.
Carol Leigh, pro-sex worker Scarlot Harlot who speaks in all the progressive papers about legalizing prostitution, admitted in a 2004 debate in San Francisco that “95% of my friends want out of prostitution.” To argue that there’s some large contingent of radical feminists imposing their will on prostituted women is ridiculous.
And please never, ever forget that the average age of entry into prostitution is 13-years-old when defending hooking as a legitimate career choice. If a 13-year-old turns 18 after five years she does not suddenly make an adult decision to prostitute; that decision has already been made for her by men.
It’s so easy to forget prostitution is a leisure activity for men. If men playing poker spread as much slavery, AIDS, child rape, and murder as men playing john no one would try to defend poker’s right to exist despite the devastation it leaves in its path. I cannot agree that the life-ruining global human rights violations perpetrated against tens of millions of women and children are acceptable costs to provide a form of men’s entertainment. Women’s bodily integrity, health and lives are worth more than a few moments of dicksticking amusement for men.
In short, I reject your "boys will be boys" reasoning for not listening to the 90% of prostituted people around the world who say they want your help getting out of prostitution and not legalization or normalization of prostitution as a job. 100% of 854 prostitutes said they did not want anyone they loved to have to prostitute. Honor them by helping to make a world where the people they love never have to prostitute because men have been forced to decrease their predations on poor people.
http://www.prostitutionresearch.com
Sam