When many of the women collapsed
More from the piece on prostitution in Germany by Manuela Schon at Feminist Current. There’s a section on…prostitution in the educational system.
Pro Familia, a member of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), is an organization that advises schools in their sex education materials. Among the material they recommended for teenagers is a book called, “Sexualpädagogik der Vielfalt“ (which loosely translates to “Sexual Pedagogy of Diversity”). This text includes suggestions and material for projects in which students are asked to name sex positions and to “modernize a brothel.” In small groups they are to discuss what “services” a “Freudenhaus der sexuellen Lebenslust” (which loosely translates to “pleasure house of sexual lust for life”) should offer.
Those who protested this kind of content being introduced into curriculum were accused of being “reactionary,” “conservative,” and “prudish.
Members of the teachers’ union (GEW) in the state of Hessen were offered advanced teacher training courses between 2006 and 2015, taught by a pro-decriminalization lobby group called “Dona Carmen.” Teachers could collect professional training credits by participating. (Last year, the general assembly decided to eliminate these courses from the education program.)
The normalization of prostitution in Germany, even among school-aged children, has lead to young men celebrating their high school graduation (called “Abitur”) together in brothels. Here, it’s no big deal that boys as young as 16 go to their local prostitution apartment to buy sex (something I see on a regular basis in my own neighbourhood).
This isn’t liberated sex education, please notice, all about mutual pleasure and consent – it’s about prostitution in brothels. It’s pleasure for the john, and no one else.
The next section is about the hunt for bargains.
“Geiz ist geil” is a phrase commonly used in German ads and marketing campaigns, meaning, “greed is hot” or “greed is good.” Unsurprisingly, this idea — that the public should try to get everything as cheaply as possible — is transferred to the prostitution market as well. Women are sold as products, so, as products, they should be as cheap as possible. Brothel owners fall over themselves trying to offer the best bargain:
Attention, K-Mart shoppers: you can poke her for 20 minutes for 20 Euro. It’s cheaper than going to the movies!
A flat-rate brothel chain called “Pussy Club” made headlines when, on its opening day on June 5, 2009, 1,700 men lined up to get in. The long lineups outside women’s rooms lasted until closing time when many of the women collapsed from exhaustion, pain, injuries, and infections, including painful rashes and fungal infections that spread from their genitals down their legs. It was shut down a year later for human trafficking.
Flat-rate brothels are very common in Germany, as well as “tabuslos,” meaning “no taboos.” In practice, this translates to “everything without any protection.” As a result, STDs are on the rise in Germany (HIV rates have gone up after several years of stagnation), and it’s common for married men to infect their wives.
Competing for customers means that brothel chains like the Pascha in Cologne offer gambling games with the chance of winning a free hookup. A brothel in Berlin gives customers a “collection card” like coffee shops do — five visits will grant you a 50 per cent rebate, and your 11th visit is free.
Women as cut-price meat. This is the glorious utopia of decriminalizing the sex trade.
Wow. I mean, the way they’ve treated the prostitutes is awful beyond words.
But I’m also creeped out by the messages the kids are getting. This “normalization of sex work” isn’t teaching people that sex workers are workers like any other, worthy or respect for their labor. The entire framework is to imagine yourself exploiting them. In the process, not only are the workers treated as a product for sale rather than employees with decision making abilities, but the other message is that sex is about satisfying the man at whatever cost of discomfort and emotional sacrifice the woman has to make. In short, it’s reinforcing modern “pro-sex” patriarchy.
Any actual ‘normalized sex-work’ would be unrecognizable. THEORETICALLY, some establishment could function as a workplace for ’empowered,’ self-actualizing women…but not on this planet. And not when the brutality and exploitation are eroticized in themselves.
In one way it’s hard to see how even theoretically that could work, given that the whole idea is based on paying one party for access. The paying implies that access wouldn’t be given otherwise, so it’s hard to see how giving access for money is empowering (except in the minimal sense that income is empowering). It seems like saying working in a chicken processing plant is empowering. At least, it does if the establishment is one where the empowered woman is expected to sell access several/many times over one shift.
Even if – for the sake of argument – we tolerate brothels for adults I really don’t see what the teenagers are supposed to gaining from this? What, exactly, is the learning outcome supposed to be? How to modernise a brothel doesn’t seem to add anything of value to their personal sexual knowledge. I suppose it could lead to a discussion about sexual ethics and prostitution but it’s a bit of a roundabout way to introduce the subject.
I shared this article on facebook, because despite living in Austria, I was horrified by the extent of this and really didn’t know HOW bad things have become. It lead to a very long and frustrating debate with two male aquaintences (one of whom is a very sweet, well meaning guy, who unfortunately fell for ALL of the liberal feminism BS, and the other one turned out to be a complete idiot), during which my disgust for the elementary school type room in the ‘teenyland’ brothel was called ‘kinkshaming’. Seriously.
Ugh. Of course it was. “Kink” excuses everything.
I assume the learning is for something like a business class. It had better not be intended as sex ed.
Nope – the article says it’s part of the sex ed class.
I can see selling sexual services–even a simple PIV or PIA fuck is more than just one party granting access, after all–as a self-employed skilled worker. But I’ve never yet heard of a brothel that didn’t offer freebies under certain circumstances, and obligating the workers to accept clients whether they wanted to or not (the “or not” being otherwise known as “rape.”)
When that happens, and when sexual services are offered for heterosexual women and that’s widely acceptable, I’ll be a lot less skeptical about the push to normalize sex work and its cheery libertarian feminist cheerleaders.
OT, sorta.
I just ‘discovered’ Andrea Dworkin. IMHO she was frighteningly prophetic in some ways.