I suggest a valuable mental exercise for every contributor who sincerely believes that there is nothing wrong with prostitution, that there should be no quibbling about the perfectly reasonable exchange of sex for money, etc. Here it is: every time (every single time) you hear someone, including yourself, use prostitution or sexual accommodation as a metaphor for spinelessness, gutlessness, venality, dishonesty, vacuity, weakness etc. — stop and issue a verbal correction.
When someone refers to the corporate media as “presstitutes,” interrupt and tell them that there is nothing wrong with prostitution, it is an honest profession and quite separate from corruption or cowardice. When someone talks about spineless Democrats despicably “rolling over for” the Bush regime or the US press “going on its knees” to Bush, remind them that there is nothing at all demeaning about submitting to male sexual demands, particularly if money changes hands. Every time someone calls a politician “corporate whore”, tell them how legit a career prostitution is or should be, and how unfair it is to invoke it as a casual insult. Every time someone says “lies like a whore” or “whores around” or “what a cocksucker” or “he’s Cheney’s bitch” or “that sucks” or “I wouldn’t just bend over for that” or “jeez we really took it in the shorts that time” or any of the plethora of other everyday expressions that reveal a reflexive equation of sex and domination, receptivity and inferiority… interrupt the conversation, and defend the whores.
All the above, and most of what follows was written by European Tribune contributor DeAnander. I was planning to write today about World AIDS Day, but was struck by some of the content provided in several threads started (by AgnesaParis) in recent days over at the European Tribune about the sex trade, prostitution and the accompanying violence:
Legalising prostitution : a lesser evil ?
Evils of the world : of sexual slavery
The human body: yet another consumable?
There is an amazing wealth of information, polite discussion and links in these threads, so I can only encourage you to read them. I’d like to quote a few extracts by DeAnander, who is quite knowledgeable about the topic (but there are several other notable contributors, notably myriad about the Australian experience of legalisation of prostitution):
the harm done to women in prostitution is not merely a byproduct of the illegality of the trade and the secrecy, repression and coercion typical of an illegal business. Harm is also the commodity being sold. In the legal brothels of Australia, a woman can lose income if she refuses painful anal intercourse with a client; her only other option is to charge more for enduring the painful experience. I suggest the reader — particularly the hetero male reader — might wish to think seriously about how much a well-endowed man would have to pay him to cooperate with such a demand — would it be more than $500 AUD? How much would it be? What would it be like to make a living catering to such demands, several times a day? To lose significant money by insisting on only “safe” or ordinary sex? To be offered big bonuses for risking HIV infection by not insisting on a condom? How much money would one have to earn to make it worthwhile? Would it be preferable to other “dirty” jobs like bricklaying, ditch-digging, or cleaning toilets?
And more fundamentally, is there any such thing as a “fair price” for hurting and demeaning another person? Perhaps we can calculate one by asking, What price would you or I pay to have our daughter, or any other woman we cared about, spared from such an experience? What would we pay in ransom to get our daughter safely out of such a situation? I’m thinking five figures, six figures, heck, most parents would pay whatever was asked, if they had to go into debt for the rest of their lives. Why are not prostituted women paid these kinds of sums, if that is the fair-market price for the various harms they are expected to endure?
The question of why so many men wish to hurt or demean women is a far larger one. The scope of a discussion of patriarchy, misogyny, and their bearing on male sexuality as constructed in various cultures around the world, is so vast that I doubt a whole forum could hold it, let alone one thread or diary. (Head over to Stan’s place and join the brawl in progress.) I would suggest that for the moment, rather than fleeing to idyllic fantasies of Bonobo-land, those concerned with social justice should accept the prevailing Hobbesian realities: that many men enjoy hurting women and find sex inadequate unless it includes bullying and hurting; that these men are very likely to try to buy access to “disposable” women and children for anonymous use, so as to avoid the complications and loss of reputation involved in being a known batterer or abuser within a community; and working from these distressing but well-attested realities, figure out how to curb this tendency and protect our society’s most vulnerable women and children from it. Figuring out how these men got to be this way and how we could raise boys to be less violent and hateful towards girls and women, would be a fine project; but that’s a multigenerational effort. In the meantime there is actually-existing abuse and suffering to be addressed, and no easy answers.
Certainly criminalising the prostituted women themselves is absurd and misogynist. They are either free agents engaging voluntarily in sexual trade, or victims of coercion, and in neither case are they coercing or doing harm to others. Perhaps what should be criminalised is “profiteering off the sexual labour of another person” (there have been laws like this in the past prohibiting pimping specifically). And of course existing laws against kidnapping, rape, assault and GBH should be applied without prejudice to offences against prostituted women (fat chance of that, in a world where male police, judges, lawyers and politicians are often among the men abusing the prostitutes, but it’s a nice idea).
The paper on choice, law, and prostitution is S Anderson, “Prostitution and Sexual Autonomy: Making Sense of the Prohibition of Prostitution”, from Ethics July 2002. I don’t think it is available online, unless you have access to Lexis/Nexis or something similar. Which is a pity as it is one of the best discussions to date of the debate between normalisers and abolitionists.
And again this:
It is a post-Enlightenment, rights-oriented outlook that tells us it is not appropriate for a businessman to tell his secretary to dress sexy for the office, or to do his holiday shopping for him; we draw a basic distinction between the kinds of services that are appropriately exchanged for money, i.e. ‘what is in my job description,’ and those which are, or should be, a reflection of intersubjectivity and reciprocity. We look down on people who use sexual favours to get ahead in academia or the workplace. We don’t want to work for bosses who grope the staff, or make pay raises conditional on a quick shag in the storeroom.
If we take a classic laissez-faire neoliberal approach to prostitution and say that there are no services which it is inappropriate to exchange for money, and that therefore performing sex for money is no different from typing or canning fish for money — hey, it’s just supply and demand, rational actors completing a transaction like any other in a free market — then how do we at the same time maintain that the secretary should not be required to fellate the boss? After all, if there is nothing shaming or demeaning about performing sexual acts on persons for whom one has no intimate affection, no basis of trust or love, then why should this not be in her job description right along with shorthand and typing?
But instinctively we know that using the lever of money-power to coerce sexual service is a qualitatively different type of transaction from paying for 8 hours of someone’s time to translate documents or wash cars. Permitting extreme physical intimacy from an untrusted and unloved Other or stranger, on their terms, according to their demand, requires a renunciation of fundamental human boundaries, the acceptance of a profound violation of personal space and bodily/emotional integrity. Having at the same time to maintain a pretence — an artificial persona — only adds to the alienation. Anyone who has ever worked Reception for 8 hours a day can tell you how wearying and crazy-making it can be to smile brightly and make nice with often obnoxious strangers all day, even when you are having trouble at home or not feeling very well — to have to put on an act all day long; imagine having to provide them with the most intimate sexual services as well.
We can judge the depth of our attachment to personal integrity by the shock, outrage, and/or fear that we feel when we read about (or heaven help us, experience) male/male prison rape and prostitution. When men in prison must submit to sexual service in order to survive or to get along or to earn money, we consider this a tragedy and a horror, a dreadful indictment of an inhumane prison system, a damaging and traumatising experience — even when some degree of (constrained) choice is involved, we know that rape and the threat of rape are forever hovering to sway that choice. And we know that vanishingly small numbers of men would make those choices if they were free, on the outside.
But we are supposed to believe that women and girls — who live in a society not so different from prison society for men, where an unprotected female without wealth is at high risk for rape, and where the protection of one man (however exploitative) may seem better than being “thrown to the wolves” — take no harm from the same experience. To believe this, seems to me, is to believe that men are somehow more real human beings, with more dignity and sense of self and self-worth, than women; which, if I may speak strongly for a moment, is the fundamental assumption of a bigot — whether racial religious, or sexual. To assume that another person’s self-respect and dignity are inherently of less worth or importance than another’s is surely the base assumption of anti-democracy, the root of caste and feudal class and race slavery.
When men are treated as sexual merchandise by other men in prison, we are deeply shocked and understand that this experience could wound and scar an individual’s soul and pride for life. We understand the same when men are coerced into playing out pornographic scenes in Abu Ghraib. When the coercion used is money rather than guns (or money and guns and fists in many cases), and the coerced or constrained person is female, for some reason we collectively believe that she is miraculously resilient and tough and ultra-balanced enough to take no harm from relinquishing her physical boundaries and allowing the occupation and use of her body by an untrusted other.
Again, all the above is not written by me, but by DeAnander, and certainly deserves a wider distribution.
Please ponder her words – and there’s lots more in the 3 threads linked to above.
Thanks for posting this Jerome. I woke up with rape and war on my mind today. Don’t know why, because I have no personal experience with either – it just seemed important to think about.
if i find any time today im going to comment on this….i didnt realize it was cross posted and i am happy i wont have to deal with the bullshit that goes on in other places to have a menaingful discussion over this issue.
thanks jerome
im gonna go read the links while i eat breakfast
I think you are mixing apples and oranges.
This is not a debate about what is wrong or right with prostitution but rathee this is a debate about whether or not to deny a HUGE percentage of a population legal protection under the law.
No one is for the promotion of prostitution as a profession rather most people are against the criminalization of prostitution. Since before Mary Magdelene prostitution has existed and since then it has been proven that criminalization has not stopped or even curtailed the profession it just adds more undue harm. Without legalization there is NO RECOURSE.
I rather like the system that is instituted in France where prostitution is legal but it is illegal to be a “mec” a pimp which is equated in France’s legislation as slavery.
What legalizing does is to accord “protection” under the law and in return it keeps out underage children and requires healthchecks which are beneficial to the prostitute and to the clients. Even taxes are collected.
As those of you who click through to the Eurotrib discussion, you will see that I have serious reservations that more sanctions against prostitution and the prostitures themselves would damage the very people we would wish to protect. Driving legal brothels underground would give authorities less opportunity to improve their working conditions and give access to counselling services. In a recent case in England I would content that the illegal status facilitated the people trafficing. Prosecuting the workers themselves would surely having the peverse effect of driving them further into prostitution if only to pay off fines they could not otherwise afford.
I also have serious reservations that AgresaParis has written purely on the undoubted plight of the women involved in the sex trade. Worryingly in the earlier posts she appears to completely conflate male prostitution and thereby homosexuality with paedophilia and child abuse. Her comments on the women are highly relevant, especially concerning the plight of those from eastern Europe being traded into the cities in the West. In the post quoted she only seems to think that male prostitution exists within the context of male prison rape and stronger prisoners’ “ownership” of the weaker. This presumably is so she can fit it to her pimp exploiter/raped or abused girl model. This results in some nonsense like:
Now that may well be her experience in Paris but it is certainly not the case in the UK or indeed the USA where there are certainly male “escorts” for women and, probably to a larger extent, gay men. One site, Rentboy.com lists the following number of men advertising:
330 New York
160 Los Angeles
57 San Francisco
31 Washington DC
among other cities in the US. Even with the language differences, some 75 are listed under Paris, France. While these numbers are not great, they are only those paying to advertise on one web site. Certainly not the “vanishingly small” number she suggests would chose to become sex workers.
While I am prepard to accept that there will be similarities in terms of young and homeless boys as well as girls being expoloited, I would contend that generally what we are discussing is the abuse of female sex workers by male clients and pimps.
I guess Agnes à Paris has never been to the Bois de Boulogne if she had she would see as many men lined up waving down cars as women.
I get very suspicous of “women” writing diaries that promote MORE legalized restrictions on women…
In fact I have always felt that men (of any sexual orientation) make “better” prostitutes than women… because they can more easily seperate their emotions from sex. Did you see the 6′ Under episode when David waits for Kieth downstairs while he services the lawsuit guy… Men have less of a problem prostituting themselves than women who have to overcome societal pressures of being chaste until wed.
Rather interesting now that you say so.
Each time I refer to prostitute to anybody makes a reference I always make a point that I think prostitution is like any other job (my hope, one day with social security and taxes) and that they deserve all the respect.
So, when soneone says the Bush administration are a bunch of prostittues (actually using other words), I always ask what do they have against prostitutes in a serious way… it is amazing how all the people I have met inmediately change and say: yes you are damned right.. they are….and proceed to use something more appropriate.
So, yes I do it.
A pleasure
I do have one comment about the US Republicans and prostitutes. I suppose it depends what you mean by prostitution. If you define it as receiving money in return for others using your body for sexual satisfaction, there might be an instance.
Now many of you may realise that professional bodybuilders have to make large investments of time and money in order to achieve their body mass. Food and supplements, not to say any chemical help, comes expensive in the quantities required to really bulk up and with the amount of gym work needed there is little time to earn money in conventional professions – certainly until a certain level of development is reached. In Europe for example there are only that many episonde of “Rome” or reworkings of Greek myths (or modelling jobs in art colleges Mr Connery) in which to flex your pecs. So to support themselves many younger bodybuilders look out for “sponsors”. They provide them with “sponsorship” in return for “private displays” of how their bodies are developing.
Enough said?
These are two VERY different things.
As a sex worker, performing this act is part of the job description. For the secretary, unless this requirement was part of the initial job description, a boss making such a demand would be extorting a “service” from her with the threat to fire her.
Is, or can it be, demeaning work? Absolutely, but isn’t that a choice for an individual to make? There are many jobs that strong men tend to do, jobs that are very, very dangerous that pay extremely well. Roustabouts on oil wells, the Alaskan fishing fleet. The men are CHOOSING to take advantage of an asset they have in return for higher rewards. Are we to continue to treat women as a class that needs to be protected from making such choices?
I also reject the idea that I am comfortable with the idea of legalization because I’m a hetero male. As Parker said, this is a question of whether ALL citizens are equal under the law, and it seems to me that a legal framework IN THE LIGHT OF DAY makes it much more likely that equal protection is a workable goal.
PS: I’m a pretty extreme libertarian when it comes to victimless crimes. Prostitution, drugs, gambling … ALL should be legal to sell and legal to buy, with appropriate legal controls and taxation. This is far preferable than the current mess we have now, where desperate people are left with little protection, higher risks and at the mercy of the unscrupulous.
I don’t want to seem trite here, but I don’t perceive anything intrinsically wrong with selling sexual favor for money or gifts as long as it’s a truly voluntary action and not one stemming from coercion.
For me, selling one’s sexual favor is a legitimate thing, selling one’s vote, (a vote that affects many, not just one “partner”), this is not legitimate under any circumstances.
Certainly there are huge problems regarding serious exploitation and abuse within what has come to be known as the sex trade, and even so-called pornography has morphed into a gargantuan multi-billion dollar business that has devolved into having seriously destructive social ramifications (It wasn’t always so with erotica, but it has now taken on a different cast which is exploitative of societal peculiarities in ways it never was before.)
My point above, however, is that sex for money, in itself, is not necessarily a bad thing.
I think we should not deny that there is also a lot of commonality between the pornography industry and prostitution. Apart from a very few stars, the girls featured in staight porn and the men in gay porn have a limited shelf life. For fairly obviious reasons the men in straight porn have much longer careers. The money earned from appearing in each movie is not great so unless they have another career or are one of those few stars, they will have to supplement their income.
Travelling the country doing exotic dancing is one option but often this will also involve more initimate inter-action with the clients. The “cat farm” featured in the MTV series also “headlines” porn stars as attractions.
I agree with the points you make about the linkage between and the economic considerations common to the porn industry and parts of the sexual prostitution trade.
I wouldonly say that the particular problems you illuminate are actually porn-centric by and large, and not in themselves generated by the sexual favors for money dynamic.
As for government whores, what are we to make of Jeff Guckert/Gannon? Both a literal and metaphorical whore. Are both sides of his equation OK? Neither?
Jerome has a point, though not necessarily the one he wanted to make.
Instead of saying that Joe Lieberman is “prostituting” himself, why not say that Lieberman is “Cheneying” himself, or “Bushing” himself? Why insult prostitutes by equating someone like Lieberman with them?