new book "The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men who Buy It"

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new book "The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men who Buy It"

Postby sam » Mon Apr 13, 2009 7:58 am

Prostitution: What if we only criminalized the men?
Sweden did, and with stunning success, says a new book about johns. Could it work here?
http://www.thestar .com/news/insight/article/617144#Comments
Apr 12, 2009
Leslie Scrivener

In the international exploitation and trafficking of women for sex, it's men, the customers, who have been overlooked, writes Victor Malarek, in his new book, The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men who Buy It. One of Canada's top investigative reporters, Malarek urges governments to go after the johns, whom he calls "the users and abusers."

Some claim that women choose to work as prostitutes, but you call it the ultimate act of humiliation and desperation.

A very small number do it by choice. Studies show that the vast majority, 89 per cent in one, desperately want out. They're hungry, need to feed children or give health care to aging parents, and the only alternative is to take their clothes off and service platoons of men.

They can't get any other work?

Not in many Third World countries or where sex tourists go. For women in Moscow, Kiev, other parts of Ukraine, there is absolutely no work for young women. They are in abject poverty ... There are so many escorts, from Third World countries, you have to ask, "How did they get here?" They don't have business acumen or language skills. On the lower east side in Vancouver, the vast majority have serious mental-health issues, drug issues, or are native women tossed off reserves. They're controlled by pimps with a bag of white powder. The drug is their handcuffs.

You say men are the root of the problem, and in seeking a "moment of bliss," they deepen the misery of the women they pay for sex.

These men never ask how she is, how did she get here, is she being forced. They don't look into her eyes beyond the veneer of gaudy makeup, stiletto heels and cheap clothes. They just want to get their rocks off. When money changes hands, it's the ultimate conscience pacifier. They don't have to deal with guilt.

Most johns you encountered express entitlement, like the one who urged his fellow "mongers" to get out there and "enjoy what man was put here for." Do johns know what women really think of them?

They delude themselves into believing that every moan and groan is because of their magnetic masculinity. They want to believe it, and the women are trained to do this.

The story of Norm, a john who confesses his capacity to "ignore" the effects of his hobby, is revealing. His insight was rare?

When anyone on the world (online) sex sites raises the question about conscience, they are immediately asked, "Are you a feminist, a fem-Nazi, a fundamentalist? Who are you?" They don't want anyone to raise the question.

You have no patience with what you call the "happy-hooker lobby," which claims that these are pros who take pride in their jobs and exercise choice.

The happy-hooker crowd is shilling for the porn industry, the strip clubs, pimps and escort services. The big hot button is health. Women carry health cards to show they are disease-free. Why just women? Why should they be the ones playing Russian roulette every time a guy comes in? Guys are the vectors of disease. On those sites they say, "I like to go `bareback.'" It's the men who go home and transfer it to their significant others. Then there's harm "reduction." They don't say "elimination." They can never guarantee a woman will not be beaten up by her next john.

Many people think it's safest for women to legalize prostitution. Why don't you?

In Amsterdam, the mayor is saying, "What a big fricking mistake." Women are still controlled en masse by pimps, beaten, trafficked, forced. They are on drugs. Organized crime is all over this. Unions never happened. Escape clauses for women who wanted to get out – they didn't put in place the measures they were supposed to. When a country legalizes prostitution, it lives off the avails of prostitution through taxation and in effect becomes a pimp.

If johns are charged, as you recommend, how would women be protected?

I strongly believe the vast majority of women are victims and shouldn't be charged or picked up in vice raids. You should pick up the men. They are demanding it, doing whatever they want. Sweden decriminalized the women and criminalized the men. They know it is a human-rights violation, that you'll never have equality and dignity and respect for women as long as this is allowed. Sweden is a beacon. The number of prostituted women has been reduced by half. Norway just introduced legalisation in January.

Would it work here?

I believe it would. We have a mishmash of laws that don't seem to make sense. Sweden is concerned with equality of women ... and an option for women to be retrained, to seek psychological help, all the safety valves. Here, there is certainly no protection for women.

Why do you say we can't "give up" and say prostitution has been part of life and likely always will be?

You hear clichés that prostitution is the oldest profession. I counter that it's the oldest oppression. I don't live in a dreamland. I know it will always exist, but we have to put breaks on what has become an absolute sexual calamity around the world. Look at the planeloads of men arriving in Thailand, or Costa Rica, bars filled with Canadian men, and think of millions of young women around the world servicing from three to four to 20 men a day. This seems to be more and more accepted. Traffickers, pimps and brothel owners can't find enough local women, so they hunt down petrified girls who have never wanted to do this.

Can you see any circumstance where you'd understand why a man would visit a prostitute – invalid wives, sexless marriages, and men with disabilities?

I tell them, "Go look for a relationship." There are a lot of men who are extremely lazy. They say they don't want the drama, they don't want to invest in relationships.

You've written about your own difficult youth. Did you ever have any such encounters?

No ... I was in a hotel talking to a prostitute, she said, "By the way, I normally charge $175, but because you're good-looking I'll charge you $100." My jaw dropped. I didn't know what to say ...

I walked away.
"Your orgasm can no longer dictate my oppression"

Trisha Baptie
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Re: new book "The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men who Buy It"

Postby phio gistic » Tue Apr 14, 2009 5:06 am

It sounds like a good book.

I hate hearing this cliche that the interviewer repeated - "prostitution has been part of life and likely always will be"

I like to counter with, "Murder is actually the oldest crime, but we don't throw our hands up in the air and say "That's just the way things have to be, murder is human nature, dontchaknow."
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Re: new book "The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men who Buy It"

Postby sam » Tue Apr 14, 2009 7:50 am

What they really mean when they say that is, "Women are natural born whores."

Ditto "Women are natural born whores." as the true meaning of 'the world's oldest profession'

There used to be a man in my life who sat in my living room and told me hospital invalids deserved sex from prostitutes. My reply was that if he cared so much about the sexual health of the elderly and disabled then he should head to St. Vincent's Hospital and volunteer his hands, mouth and anus to the noble cause. He scrunched his face up and turned dismissively to the side with a look of, "Don't be stupid Sam, women are the whores."
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Re: new book "The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men who Buy It"

Postby sam » Sun Apr 26, 2009 9:47 am

Another article.

http://www2.canada .com/montrealgazette/features/viewpoints/story.html?id=4ae293fa-00de-4dbf-a893-2c184573edce
Sex: a dangerous trade for women and children
JANET BAGNALL, The Gazette
Published: Friday, April 24

Want to know what kind of man pays for sex? Here's Rod, 38, a systems analyst who describes himself as "not much to look at." Every year for the past 12 years, he has taken a two-week sex vacation in the Philippines.

"It's what I look forward to all year. I get to bed the hottest babes who think I'm really cool. I know I could never, ever get one of these girls to go out with me back home. There's no way. But on vacation, they gush all over me. I get my pick and have to push so many of them away. It's my paradise."

Rod was one of the men Victor Malarek, a Montreal-born investigative journalist, interviewed for The Johns: Sex For Sale and the Men Who Buy It. The Johns is a sequel to Malarek's book on the global sex trade, The Natashas.

The Natashas was about the harrowing supply side of the multi-billion-dollar business that prostitution has become; in The Johns, Malarek wades into the fetid waters of the demand side.

Demand for paid sex is skyrocketing, a result of sex tourism, sex trafficking, widely available pornography and Internet sites in which men try to make paying for sex seem normal, with some success. Malarek writes that an estimated 70 per cent of Japanese men have paid for sex and in Spain, 39 per cent.

Stag tourism - a pre-wedding blowout - is a trend that's sweeping North America, Britain, Australia and Europe, Malarek says, "as best men hook up with party-planning travel agencies offering unforgettable stag weekends." Businessmen lunch in strip clubs as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world.

When Eliot Spitzer, former New York State governor and champion of the toughest anti-trafficking law in the U.S., was found using call girls, he was allowed to leave office without facing the criminal charges that could have applied.

"We have concluded that the public interest would not be further advanced by filing charges in this matter," U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia said in November, as though being embarrassed was the worst thing Spitzer should have to endure.

The majority of men who pay to use another person's body are "profoundly uncomfortable with empowered women," Malarek writes. Their preference is for women from poor, undeveloped countries that have yet to be invaded by what these men view as the "feminist plague."

"For them," Malarek writes, "prostitution is the last bastion of manhood, where the old order they all long for remains intact."

The old order is not a nice place for women and children. Malarek cites a 2006 British study in which 207 women from 14 countries were interviewed. The women had been rescued after being trafficked into prostitution.

Almost eight in 10 had been physically attacked by a long lineup of assailants - traffickers, pimps, brothel or club owners, and johns. Ninety per cent had been forced or intimidated into performing sexual acts. Sixty-one per cent had been threatened with weapons.

Unsurprisingly, another study found that 89 per cent of women in prostitution wanted to get out. They couldn't because they had no other means of survival. The same research found that 68 per cent of the women suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Malarek scorns the idea that legalizing prostitution would serve to protect the women and children trapped in it: "Legalization sends a message that it's OK to purchase women for sex, to impose their sexual will via the almighty dollar," Malarek writes.

Malarek argues that the countries of the world should instead follow the example of Sweden, which in 1999 decriminalized prostitution while at the same time made buying sex a crime. In Canada, prostitution is legal; soliciting is not.

The preamble to Sweden's law states, "In Sweden prostitution is regarded as an aspect of male violence against women and children. It is officially acknowledged as a form of exploitation of women and children and constitutes a significant ... gender equality will remain unattainable so long as men buy, sell and exploit women and children by prostituting them."

On Sunday, Malarek was in Montreal to talk about his book, one of the speakers at a Books & Breakfast session. He said that he had had it with all the clichés that are still trotted out about prostitution - about how it's the world's oldest profession, how we'll never get rid of it, and how boys will be boys.

"It's the world's oldest oppression of women," he said. I looked around to see practically every woman in the audience vigorously applauding.
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Re: new book "The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men who Buy It"

Postby oneangrygirl » Sun May 03, 2009 10:46 am

From "Quill and Quire"

BOOK REVIEWS
The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men Who Buy It
by Victor Malarek

Publisher: Key Porter Books
Price: $29.95 cloth
ISBN: 978-1-55470-157-5
Page count: 288 pp.
Size: 6 x 9
Released: March
In Canada, it’s nice to pretend that prostitution isn’t the dangerous social ill it used to be. For one thing, this country no longer has any prostitutes. It now boasts “sex workers” who march into the night under the aegis of advocacy groups, health clinics, and a sympathetic police force. For another, the sale of sex isn’t the assault on mainstream morality it once was. When advertising for even the most ordinary products consists of lascivious innuendo, and electronic trails of paid porn sites haunt half the home computer hard drives in the land, prostitution is just one more facet of our hyper-erotic culture. Can’t we agree that the oldest profession has acquired at least a tolerable semblance of safety and legitimacy?

Well, no. In The Johns, Victor Malarek sets out to demonstrate that prostitution is a pandemic that is destroying more lives worldwide than ever before. An award-winning investigative journalist, Malarek has produced a sort-of sequel – or companion – to 2004’s The Natashas, which examined the flourishing sex trade (and its adjunct, human trafficking) in post-Soviet Eastern Bloc countries. Whereas before he focused on the “supply side” of the transaction – the women and children who are pushed into service – here he looks at the “demand side”: the men who rent them. The resulting investigation of johns in Europe, Asia, North America, and Australia provides as disgusting a catalogue of venality, cruelty, and turpitude as you could imagine.

Malarek lists several reasons why ever larger numbers of men are prepared to pay for sex. Many, he alleges, are befuddled and angered by the empowerment of women in Western society, and now seek redress by essentially purchasing female submission. Many express a very modern desire for “hassle-free” physical gratification that skirts the messiness of traditional romantic relationships. These drives, combined with the ease of 21st-century travel and the international community’s failure to zealously prosecute johns, have transformed much of the developing world into a fantasy land where men can indulge in truly abhorrent sexual escapades with no repercussions.

Chapter by chapter, Malarek feeds us a superabundance of appalling anecdotes from both here and abroad. He recounts the adventures of Donald Bakker who, with his wife’s complicity, tortured over 60 drug-addicted prostitutes from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. He takes us to Svay Pak, a remote Cambodian village that specializes in the sale of child sex, and to Las Vegas, where ’tweens are being trafficked at truck stops. Some of his most disturbing stories involve the betrayal of those at risk by authorities pledged to help them. In one case, for example, a woman recalls being held captive by her pimp in the Bosnian town of Tuzla, where she was routinely savaged by UN peacekeepers and aid workers stationed in the area.

In researching this book, Malarek interviewed 16 men, and parsed the contents of “more than fifty Web sites” and “five thousand posts” in john-friendly Internet chat rooms. Unfortunately, the forum discussions, from which he quotes at length, exhibit the ugly tendencies of so much online repartee: they are often inane, semi-literate, and exaggeratedly aggressive. It’s hard to believe that the johns who frequent these rooms – men with nicknames like “Assman,” “Longhorn,” and “Tigerwoody” – didn’t sacrifice conversational honesty for the boisterous one-upmanship that male camaraderie often demands. Online eavesdropping may provide a general impression of johns’ motives and habits, but a greater emphasis on face-to-face questioning (with subjects’ anonymity assured) would have produced more reflective and accurate responses.

Malarek must also be taken to task for his claim that “prostitution – all prostitution – is not about choice.” The six-year-old Thai girl forced to administer “yum-yum” to sex tourists, or the Moldovan teenager who’s kidnapped and shipped to Serbia for repeated raping, inhabit a world far different than the high-society pros who serviced Charlie Sheen and Eliot Spitzer for thousands of dollars an hour. It has to be acknowledged that some prostitutes do exercise significant agency in their lives, and that the actions of this enfranchised minority provide cover to the more exploitative elements in the industry.

In the book’s closing chapters, Malarek offers his prescription for a global problem. Having already railed against prostitution’s legalization – he points to the disastrous consequences such a policy has had in Germany and the Netherlands – he proposes instead that only the buying of sex be criminalized. Target the johns (publicly out them, fine them, imprison them), offer succour to their quarry, and the overall viability of the business will wither. It’s a laudable plan, but one, I fear, that underestimates the intractable malignancy of human behaviour where sex is concerned.

Reviewed by Matt Sturrock (from the April 2009 issue)
I guess some slavery feels like freedom.
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