discipline posted:

I thought the swedish model was good and had good results, where prostitution is decriminalized but johns are put behind bars

lady i've been trying for a swedish model my whole life!

Did you know that 89 per-cent of the women in prostitution want to escape?” a young man told me on the first day of summer this year, as he protested in front of the offices of the Village Voice. He wanted me to understand that it is complicit in what he calls “modern-day slavery.” The Village Voice has moved the bulk of the sex-related ads it publishes onto the website Backpage.com. This young man, the leader of an Evangelical Christian youth group, wanted to hasten the end of “sex slavery” by shutting Backpage.com down. What happens to the majority of people who advertise willingly on the site, who rely on it to draw an income? “The reality is,” the man said to me, not knowing I had ever been a prostitute, “almost all of these women don’t really want to be doing it.”

Let’s ask the people around here, I wanted to say to him: the construction workers who dug up the road behind us, the cabbies weaving around the construction site, the cops over there who have to babysit us, the Mister Softee guy pulling a double shift in the heat, the security guard outside a nearby bar, the woman working inside, the receptionist upstairs. The freelancers at the Village Voice. The guys at the copy shop who printed your flyers. The workers at the factory that made the water bottles you’re handing out. Is it unfair to estimate that 89 percent of New Yorkers would rather not be doing what they have to do to make a living?

“True, many of the prostitution ads on Backpage are placed by adult women acting on their own without coercion,” writes New York Times columnist and professional prostitute savior Nicholas Kristof. But, he continues, invoking the happy hooker trope, “they’re not my concern.” He would like us to join him in separating women into those who chose prostitution and those who were forced into it; those who view it as business and those who view it as exploitation; those who are workers and those who are victims; those who are irremediable and those who can be saved. These categories are too narrow. They fail to explain the reality of one woman’s work, let alone a class of women’s labor. In this scheme, a happy hooker is apparently unwavering in her love of fucking and will fuck anyone for the right price. She has no grievances, no politics.

But happy hookers, says Kristof, don’t despair, this isn’t about women like you – we don’t really mean to put you out of work. Never mind that shutting down the businesses people in the sex trade depend on for safety and survival only exposes all of them to danger and poverty, no matter how much choice they have. Kristof and the Evangelicals outside the Village Voice succeed only in taking choices away from people who are unlikely to turn up outside the New York Times, demanding that Kristof’s column be taken away from him.

Even if they did, with the platform he’s built for himself as the true expert on sex workers’ lives, men like Kristof can’t be run out of town so easily. There’s always another TED conference, another women’s rights organization eager to hire his expertise. Kristof and those like him, who have made saving women from themselves their pet issue and vocation, are so fixated on the notion that almost no one would ever choose to sell sex that they miss the dull and daily choices that all working people face in the course of making a living. Kristof himself makes good money at this, but to consider sex workers’ equally important economic survival is inconvenient for him.

This business of debating sex workers’ choices and whether or not they have them has only become more profitable under what sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein terms “post-industrial prostitution.”

After the vigilant anti-prostitution campaigns of the last century, which targeted red-light districts and street-based prostitution, sex work has moved mostly indoors, into private apartments and gentlemen’s clubs, facilitated by the internet and mobile phones. The sex economy exists in symbiosis with the leisure economy: personal services, luxury hotels, all increasingly anonymous and invisible. At the same time, more young people find themselves without a safety net, dependent on informal economies. Sex work now isn’t a lifestyle; it’s a gig, one of many you can select from a venue like Backpage or Craigslist.

Recall the favored slogan of prostitution prohibitionists that on the internet, they could buy a sofa and “a girl.” It’s not the potential purchase of a person that’s so outrageous; it’s the proximity of that person to the legitimate market.

Bernstein calls these “slippery borders,” and asks us to observe the feelings provoked by them, and how they are transferred. Anxieties about slippery market borders become “anxieties about slippery moral borders,” which are played out on the bodies of sex workers.

The anxiety is that sex work may be legitimate after all. In a sense, the prohibitionists are correct: people who might have never gotten into the sex trade before can and are. Fighting what they call “the normalizing of prostitution” is the focus of anti-sex work feminists. In this view, one happy hooker is a threat to all women everywhere.

“It’s sad,” said the speaker from the women’s-rights NGO Equality Now in protest outside the Village Voice. She directed her remarks at the cluster of sex workers who had turned out in counterprotest. “Backpage is able to be a pimp. They’re so normalizing this behavior that a group of Backpage advertisers have come out today to oppose us.” So a prostitute’s dissent is only possible if, as they understand prostitution itself, she was forced into it.

“Why did it take so long for the women’s movement to genuinely consider the needs of whores, of women in the sex trades?” asks working-class queer organizer and ex-hooker Amber L. Hollibaugh, in her book My Dangerous Desires. “Maybe because it’s hard to listen to – I mean really pay attention to – a woman who, without other options, could easily be cleaning your toilet? Maybe because it’s intolerable to listen to the point of view of a woman who makes her living sucking off your husband?”

Hollibaugh points to this most difficult place, this politics of feelings performed by some feminists, in absence of solidarity. They imagine how prostitution must feel, and how that in turn makes them feel, despite all the real-life prostitutes standing in front of them to dispute them.

It didn’t used to be that people opposed to prostitution could only get away with it by insisting that “happy” prostitutes didn’t really exist. From Gilgamesh to the Gold Rush days, right up until Ms. Hollander’s time, being a whore was reason enough for someone to demand you be driven out of town. Contemporary prostitution prohibitionists consider the new reality, in which they deny the existence of anyone with agency in prostitution, a form of victory for women. We aren’t ruined now. We’re victims.

Perhaps what they fear most of all is that prostitutes could be happy: that what we’ve been told is the worst thing we can do to ourselves is not the worst, or even among the worst. What marks us as fallen – whether from feminism or Christ or capital – is any suggestion that prostitution did not ruin us and that we can deliver that news ourselves.

http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/happy-hookers/

But happy hookers, says Kristof, don’t despair, this isn’t about women like you – we don’t really mean to put you out of work. Never mind that shutting down the businesses people in the sex trade depend on for safety and survival only exposes all of them to danger and poverty, no matter how much choice they have. Kristof and the Evangelicals outside the Village Voice succeed only in taking choices away from people who are unlikely to turn up outside the New York Times, demanding that Kristof’s column be taken away from him.

Indeed, we might even say that those who want to shut down 'sweatshops' in the third world are ignoring that these very factories are full of young women escaping rural idiocy. Source: Cato Institute.

littlegreenpills posted:

do sex workers still get harassed and arrested by law enforcement looking for easy targets. this is a serious question. is this even an issue anywhere in the world.

There are hooker calls in Chicago, and I imagine other major cities have something similar. The sheriff does an investigation and makes a bunch of arrests. The prostitutes then wind up in the hooker call, and the prosecutor looks at the reports and backgrounds. The prosecutor might have an awkward conversation with the deputies, and then the prosecutor will talk with the social workers. The social workers explain which programmes are open to each prostitute, and the prosecutor then goes to chat with the public defender/private counsel. The prostitutes then invariably go to one of the programmes and ideally avoid a criminal conviction, although frequent guests likely already have a background. Ideally, they complete the terms of the deferred prosecution or plea, and everything is done.

EDIT: Not trying to say that they're harassed or that the officers/deputies are looking for easy arrests, rather I am saying that there are court calls in major cities that are largely or wholly dedicated to prostitution arrests..

Edited by Lykourgos (Oct. 16, 2012 03:30:20)

discipline posted:

I thought the swedish model was good and had good results, where prostitution is decriminalized but johns are put behind bars

but what about the janes?

discipline posted:

lol in germany it was legal to pay for sex from a 16 yr old girl until 2008

so what. don't be a party-pooper.

discipline posted:

18 year old females are literally girls

why are you denying their agency?

Pornography is literally everywhere, yet in reality "it's a form of filmed prostitution" – and with the average age of a boy's first exposure to hardcore internet porn now just 11, its impact is "an issue we simply cannot ignore".
...
Can there ever be such a thing as an OK sex industry?

"No. There can't. You can't commodify consent. The inherent harm at the heart of this transaction we see evidenced in the astronomical rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, which is a result of having repeated unwanted sex because you need the money. It's often argued that it's just like stacking shelves. That it is ordinary work, just like any other work. But if you're stacking shelves, is it a bit different if your manager says: 'Right, before you go at the end of your shift can you give me a blowjob?' Would you feel uncomfortable about that? It's the inherent harm of having repeated unwanted sex which lies at the heart of the problem."

Banyard regards the sex industry's male consumers as victims too. "I think their sexuality has been co-opted by a predatory sex industry, which distorts and exploits it for profit. A new generation of boys, the vast majority have watched hardcore pornography on the internet, so we have a generation of boys coming through whose first sexual experiences will be vicariously participating in prostitution. They are watching filmed prostitution and getting their ideas about sex from it. This is an industry dedicated to finding ways of getting men to come back and keep coming back for more, so it tends to be increasingly violent to keep upping that response."

So is Goatstein a victim?