You can report rape, but it’s already a form of rape
Former prostitutes who don’t view sex work as just another job.
AT RHIANNON’S* lowest point, she agreed to sex for money with a man who found her drunk, high on prescription drugs and crying on the street outside the strip club where she worked.
Back at his home, she cut her wrists in his bathroom and stuck toilet paper on them.
“The man felt it was worth paying a hundred dollars to have sex with a woman who had a tearstained face and bleeding wrists,” she said.
“I insisted on clutching the cash while he used me.”
She asked him to call her an ambulance and he shrugged, so she left and called one herself. She planned to jump off a bridge if it didn’t arrive in ten minutes.
Her story is just one of the graphic first-person testimonies in Prostitution Narratives: Stories of Survival in the Sex Trade, a shocking book that will be launched at an anti-sex trade conference at RMIT University in Melbourne this weekend.
Former prostitutes and other women across Australia are coming together to talk about the “oldest profession in the world” in a different way. They don’t use the words escort, call girl or sex worker, because they say these legitimise men paying women for sex as a service or a career. Instead, they call it abuse.
Well have they talked to enough privileged lefty women who swear up and down that prostitution is fun and empowering and well paid? Are they sure they’re not SWERFs?
Last weekend, prominent high-class call girl Samantha X gave a talk in Sydney to around 50 female fans. She spoke about her choice to leave journalism for highly lucrative sex work at 37, having quick sex and long chats with three men a day in hotels, and the safety of working for a reputable agency like hers, which screens its clients.
Many agree with her. But a growing group of survivors and abolitionists say they are disturbed at pro-sex trade lobbyists painting the industry as a profession, chosen by autonomous women because it makes them feel empowered.
Lobbyists? I thought they were the ultimate in 4th wave sex-positive purified feminists. No?
“I was groomed very young by society, a neoliberal culture,” former prostitute Simone Watson, from Western Australia, told news.com.au. “I came from a pretty lovely family. I called myself a feminist.
“I was about 23 and I needed money. I’d had sex with people I didn’t like very much before, why not get paid for it?
“Like the women around me, I took different kinds of medication. Then they can do whatever they want with you. You need to disassociate and leave your body. I used diazopenes. You couldn’t drink on the premises but I made up for it at home.”
…
Simone, 48, is now national director for the Nordic Model Australia Commission. The model, which has been successful in Sweden and was introduced in France this week, sees prostitutes decriminalised and those who pay for sex criminalised.
“What can police do i[f] sexual harassment is part of your working conditions? You can report rape, but it’s already a form of rape,” said Simone. “You get lonely johns, aggressive johns, creepy old men, mundane middle-aged men and uni students who are incredibly rude.
“It’s all on the paradigm of male violence against women. It isn’t a job like any other. Men who buy women for sex have no respect for women.”
…
Simone has been left with PTSD, anxiety and agoraphobia, so her advocacy work and travel has been challenging, but she’s desperate to create change.
Since the Nordic Model was introduced in Sweden, she says, there’s been a cultural shift. “Young people grow up thinking the idea of buying sex is abhorrent.”
Not that prostitutes are abhorrent, you see, but that buying sex is abhorrent. It’s the dehumanization.
Stories like that of Samantha X — of attractive, high-class escorts, who love their work and live a glamorous lifestyle — are often recounted by the media. Many women in the book say they once claimed the same.
The survivors gathering this weekend say the experiences they recognise are about violence, exploitation, drug abuse and self-harm. Yet they say the blame fell on them, rather than the men who paid to have sex with them. One had regular sex with a priest, who would “forgive her” afterwards.
They say most clients didn’t care if they were tired or in pain. Their detachment is clear on review sites such as PunterNet, where men make comments like “I can’t do this with real women,” or, “It’s like going to the toilet,” or “She wasn’t as young as I thought she’d be, but I f***ed her anyway.”
Go ahead, tell us how empowering that is.
*Names changed to protect identities.
Buying sex isn’t abhorrent or dehumanizing. Or. at least, it isn’t always. Like so many other human things it can positive and it can be negative.Being a soldier is a great thing in one context and a terrible thing in another. The reason we see prostitution differently is, I think, because we are still mired in a deeply Christian disgust at sex.
I don’t understand that you don’t see the contradiction in that. Buying sex is abhorrent, but the person selling it, is not? Does that work with other services too or is sex special in that way?
And sure I agree completely that this is a horrendous story. But I can collect a lot of similar stories in e.g. the fruit sector. Dehumanization is not limited to sex work. But sex work is the only case were dehumanization is used in arguing the service itself should be illegal, instead of working to end the dehumanization.
Here in Belgium we have Ghapro, it is an organization that provides free and anonymous medical and other care to prostitutes in Antwerp. They try to assist these woman to other jobs but that is not evident. They see little coercion, where they are active — beside the economical situation these woman are in. They are against punishing men that buy sex, because it is indirectly a punishment for the prostitutes too, since such a measures tend to drive prostitution underground which makes the woman more vulnerable and harder to reach by caregivers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wQKH5F7sTE
I don’t understand how you don’t understand the distinction. Nothing personal in this; I see that a great many people don’t get it. It baffles me.
Paying somebody .50¢ an hour for their labor would be abhorrent. The laborer hired would not be the morally compromised one. They’re doing what they have to do to survive, and they’re being exploited.
Paying a desperately poor person to donate a kidney would be abhorrent. The donator there is not the abhorrent party.
Buying sex with a child is abhorrent. The child involved is not abhorrent.
Exploitation is what’s abhorrent.
^ Like that. It was abhorrent when Laura Deen (iirc) wanted to dress up a bunch of black servers as slaves for catering at a theme wedding. It wasn’t abhorrent for workers to take what jobs were available.
I recently saw an article that was debunked as false, but I think it provides an enlightening thought experiment. The article gave an example of how, as a consequence of the recent legalization of “sex work” in Germany, women who declined job offers in that sector risked being denied unemployment benefits. So, here’s the challenge for anyone who thinks that prostitution may be an unpleasant job, but so is being a sewage worker or cashier at Walmart: If you think that “sex work” should be made legal and treated just like any other form of work, do you agree that unemployed people should be expected to accept a job in a brothel in the same way they should be expected to accept a job sweeping floors?
@ 6 Theo Bromine
I’m unimpressed by this gotcha. No, of course nobody should be required to be a prostitute. Nor should people with a fear of heights be required to be high rise construction workers, nor should people nauseated by the sight of blood be required to work in a slaughterhouse. I don’t even think devout Muslims should be required to be dog groomers.
In my country, if you are receiving unemployment benefits you are required to be looking for work (and be able to prove it) and your benefits will be cut off if you turn down any work you are capable of doing. But that “capable of doing” part allows for an exemption if you have a valid conscientious or psychological objection to that type of work. And “I don’t want to fuck strangers” would certainly be considered valid.
None of the above means high rise construction worker, or slaughterhouse worker, or dog groomer, are not jobs.
#7 Silentbob, your oh-so-clever response completely ignores the possibility that women could be so desperate that they would choose not to claim a “psychological exemption” no matter how much they didn’t want to fuck strangers for money.
Prostitution is not work.
@Silentbob
Doesn’t that beg the question? Why would that be considered valid? If prostitution is just work the same as any other work?
I really, really, really, don’t like calling strangers on the phone. Yet a number of times I’ve sat and cold called strangers, sometimes for hours at a time–as a volunteer for political or social campaigns, or for work-related reasons. I would hate to do phone sales, but I doubt that “I’d honest to god hate doing that” would be considered a valid reason to turn such work down if I had to take anything on offer.
Also–would employers be allowed to discriminate by sex? Would the hiring brothel be allowed to specify, “women applicants only”? I think that’s illegal here. And if they had greater demand for women–well, that implies there are factors in play beyond “just work like any other work.”
Not to mention that if it was truly ‘just work’ the prostitute under a legalised system wouldn’t be able to decline a customer, just as a cake baker can’t decline to sell a cake to the ‘wrong’ person.
The fact is, even in New Zealand, an unemployed person can refuse sex work (in fact unemployment advisors never even suggest it), brothels can make specific hiring decisions and prostitutes can refuse both clients and certain services. All recognition of the ‘not ordinary work’.
@Silentbob #7:
This was not intended to be a “gotcha”, it was intended as an honest exploration of the unintended consequences of something that “seemed like a good idea at the time”.
@Rob: It sounds like NZ’s solution for prostitution is a bit like the “safe injection site” concept where the goal is harm reduction, but there is no intent to normalize the practice (drug use or sex for sale) that is being regulated/permitted/controlled.
TheoBromine, I believe that is/was the case. To that extent there have certainly been some improvements in safety and conditions for prostitutes.
There has also been a degree of normalisation with what were previously legal strip clubs (and understood to be brothels but illegal as such) openly becoming brothels. In a couple of cases, the owners of said brothels have sought publicity for themselves and their businesses and tried to emphasise good or fun things they do not directly linked to the selling of sex as such (i.e. soft marketing – yeah laugh it up).