the structure of revolutions and prostitution

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the structure of revolutions and prostitution

Postby sam » Mon Nov 20, 2006 2:04 pm

I wrote this over at the blog Reclusive Leftist and thought it came out good enough to post here.

http://www.reclusiveleftist.com/?p=459

Let’s take this baby up a theoretical notch.

There’s a fascinating book by Thomas Kuhn called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn’s the guy who came up with the much-abused term “paradigm shift”, but there are good reasons why the book is famous and for me its outline of how revolutions happen was illuminating.

Basically, science is assumed to be based on hard data and solid theories, but if that were true then we would not see a succession of new scientific theories replacing old ones, a sun-centered universe replacing an earth-centered one. The data sets were almost the same (new technologies can reveal new data), so what accounts for the sudden sight of new scientific “truths” from observing what has always been observable? Revolutions in thought happen when the current frame of thinking – a paradigm - fails to effectively solve key puzzles in the data. A conflict crisis occurs and an “intellectually violent revolution” happens where believers in the old paradigm struggle against the changes newly seen as possible by the new one.

How does this apply to the terse debate over how to solve prostitution’s many harm-inflicting problems? Glad you asked! Kuhn talks about status quo resistance to change and believes conflict is crucial to working out new paradigms, and I think that’s why this debate gets so acrimonious and seems insolvable. In a way it is insolvable because we are operating from entirely different worldviews and accordingly look at the same data differently.

I would characterize the old paradigm as one that sees prostitution as a women’s problem and thusly suggests fixing women as the solution. Markers of this paradigm that circles around prostituted women are permits for women, STD & AIDS checks for women, condoms for women, panic-buttons for women, bad date lines for women, unions for women, “whore college” for women, etc.

It’s no shocker I believe the new paradigm is in drawing prostitution’s circle around tricking and pimping men. Markers are criminalizing tricking men, fining tricking men, “john schooling” men, tracking traffickers, punishing pimps, etc.

I would call the “key puzzle in the data” that legalization’s paradigm of building better prostitutes fails to fix is protecting prostituted women from men’s violence. According to the hypothesis, regulated legal prostitution should result in decreased violence perpetrated against women, decreased sexual slavery, decreased child prostitution, decreased crippling drug addictions, decreased STD & AIDS, and decreased trafficking. Legal prostitution theory is not holding true to its hypotheses any more than the blown-apart theory that the more users and more mainstream pornography gets the more woman-friendly porn and the porn industry will become.

Recent news from the Netherlands adds more fuel to the growing bonfire of the “fix prostituted women” paradigm’s death:

”the number of brothels in the Netherlands has decreased dramatically since they were legalised. The organisation notes, however, that the number of saunas and massage parlours has increased. It seems the illegal sector is growing."

http://www.radionetherlands.nl/currenta ... ed061031mc

My solution, coming from the “fix prostitute-(ab)using men” paradigm, would be the Swedish solution, but others are possible from this new vantage point. One element of paradigms is that they provide new ways of looking at problems, but do not provide all the solutions. They create the atmosphere from which new solutions can emerge after a creative roadblock has been hit.

Instead of the Swedish model, one could suggest tricking men be licensed and should have to openly register with governments in countries where they use prostitutes. Maybe implement a 5-hour course in responsible tricking similar to responsible driver or gun permit courses. Instead of brothels under control of pimps and madams, tricking men could be made responsible for providing a house, apartment, or hotel room to individual, independent sex workers.

Building better prostitutes is the old way of thinking about prostitution and it has failed to liberate women through centuries of theory testing. We need to unstick from the idea that men’s “need” for prostitutes is an immovable force of nature and therefore all you can do is fix prostituted women to withstand the elemental force of men’s appetites. Battered wives know there’s no such thing as building a dinner good enough to avoid attacks or keeping the house clean enough to please men into nonviolence. It’s not about the prostitute, meal, or house, it’s about communities confronting the male privilege that lets them get away with abusing wives, prostitutes, any and all women. We still inhabit a world where the dominant paradigm blames battered women for not leaving and asks rape victims what she wore, how pretty she was, what her job was, and so on.

True to Margaret Mead’s most famous axiom, Kuhn says paradigm-shifting revolutions are begun by a small group of committed persons. The paradigm’s ability to solve more of the problems, though not all of the problems, than the previous one ultimately determines whether the shift becomes a revolution replacing old truths with new truths. Unfortunately, these processes are crazy slow and the resistance to them often results in paradigm-shifters like Darwin, Copernicus, and Susan B. Anthony getting proper due for their foresight posthumously.

I’m excited to be living in the molasses thickness of a feminist revolution, and I’m trying to be more patient regarding prostitution evolution because I trust its time will come. I don’t work against legalization because I think it might someday work and prove me wrong, I do it because I hope to decrease the number of prostituted bodies piled up by the time everyone else figures out it doesn’t work and shifts to better solutions.
sam
chaotic good
 
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