An inherently exploitative dimension
This week, the French national assembly finally ended two years of wrangling and became the fifth European legislature to introduce a ban on buying sex. It is following the example set by Sweden in the late 1990s, and then by Norway and Iceland. In the UK, the Northern Ireland assembly banned it in June last year.
Many sex workers, admittedly, don’t want their clients criminalised. In France, backed by a commission of the senate, they vehemently protested that it would make their work more, rather than less, dangerous: it would reduce the number of punters, they say, and leave them facing greater competition, the more vulnerable because they would have less choice.
But reducing the number of punters is the goal, in order to reduce the number of women forced into and/or trapped in prostitution. The goal is not a large and growing market for access to women’s genitals.
If criminalisation drives prostitution back into the shadows, and leaves workers more exposed to harm than they were, then there might indeed be an argument to find a different battleground for the moral fight, and concentrate instead on minimising the harm suffered by the women who, for whatever reason, are offering sex for money.
The great difficulty, however, is that it leaves the sex industry intact. And in all paid-for sex there is, arguably, an inherently exploitative dimension. Even if there is nominally consent, in most cases, if not all, this will be a choice that women make out of desperation, rather than anything positive. The social and economic circumstances in which a woman sees sex work as the best available option represents, in itself, an environment of coercion. Criminalising not the women involved but their clients – particularly when, as in the French proposal, it is accompanied by a properly funded programme to help sex workers into more secure jobs – may be the least-bad answer, in both moral and practical terms.
Unless you look at the very few women who actively enjoy sex work and are delighted to be able to make a good living at it, and conclude that they represent a significant enough percentage of sex workers to base policy on them and not on the women who are coerced or trapped or both. But who would be that naïve?
One of the problems with this statement is that it runs counter to both the libertarian and conservative mindsets that come into play. Social conservatives disapprove of prostitution in and of itself. Much of this disapproval is directed against the women offering sex for sale. Even where social conservatives offer help, it tends to be of the strings attached and/or infantilising variety. Libertarians on the other hand, especially those on the economic right, will not be at all keen to see any significant social assistance offered to prostitutes or ex-prostitutes. After all they ‘chose’ to go into that line of business and so they should wear the consequences. Just look at libertarians attitudes towards any disadvantaged or unfortunate people.
Prostitution is called the oldest profession for a reason, and it’s not because there is anything healthy or attractive about it. Rather, the social conditions that drive prostitution have been around forever. Misogyny, poverty, lack of care for those less fortunate and no safety nets. We have a veneer of civilisation compared to our ancestors, but in reality things are not so terribly different.
Until those systemic problems are solved there is no way to safely treat prostitution as a ‘free choice’ for anyone.
How to get to that point is the real problem.
I like the description of the Nordic Model as ‘least bad’ among the options. It’s not a cure for the problems, but it’s had better results for the prostitutes themselves than either prohibition or blanket legalization. I suspect the primary effect on the johns is one of cautionary restraint–the economic imbalance inherent in the situation is at least partially countered by the fact that only one person involved is breaking the law, making going to the police over misconduct (even misconduct that would not, in itself, rise to the level of police involvement, even if it should) a viable option.
A sex worker might not be able to prove that a client violated their agreement in a fashion that constitutes rape (especially given the abysmal record of the police on such incidents), but she can at least get him busted simply for being her client, without risk of arrest to herself.
Oh, boy… the comments…
Oh, for sure, some women are forced into it – but that’s not a problem. It’s a bit like the old Athenian defence of slavery: if you were captured in war and made a slave rather than killing yourself and didn’t escape, that proved that you were a slave by nature. If you’re trafficked and don’t either kill yourself or escape, that proves you’re a happy hooker. Yay! Free celebratory blowjobs for all!
And then someone replies to that:
That’ll show those pesky women not to get above themselves.
@Enzyme #3 (quoting a comment elsewhere):
That’s gotta be an MRA. They are all experts in female psychology–and evolutionary psychology.
I have actually read an actual female evolutionary psychologist who argued something quite close to this. She claimed that most women want prostitution to be illegal because legal prostitution lowers the cost, as it were, of sex, which us women need to keep high so’s men will support us and our offspring yada yada.