“Listen to sex workers” – until they exit, then tell them to shut up
Meghan Murphy on Australia’s first abolitionist conference, and the harassment that greeted it.
A campaign headed up by Vixen, a pro-prostitution advocacy group in Australia, attempted to shut down Australia’s first abolitionist conference (which doubles as the Prostitution Narratives: Stories of Survival in the Sex Trade book launch), but failed.
Over the past week, the #RMIT2016 hashtag was overrun by prostitution fans and anti-feminists who claimed that, somehow, hosting voices of survivors and feminists who opposed the sex industry equated to “silencing” and “hate.” Vixen encouraged supporters to harass RMIT University, via Twitter and email, into shutting down the conference, though University representatives refused to comment publicly (because, why?). Feminists were called “cunts” by online protesters and one young woman suggested RMIT University be burned to the ground, as though simply speaking out against a racist, exploitative, abusive industry like prostitution deserves arson in response.
Because why? Do people think – like Amnesty International – that access to prostitutes is a human right? Do they think pimps are the defenders of human rights and abolitionists are the destroyers of human rights? Do they think access to female bodies is a human right?
Murphy includes a lot of tweets from the conference. Here’s a zinger:
Sex trade reps say "listen to sex workers" but tell those same "sex workers" to shut up as soon as they exit #oldestoppression #prostitution
— Melinda (@MelLiszewski) April 9, 2016
now where have i seen that attitude before…
oh yeah, Drumpf supporters.
Disagreement is “silencing” and “hate.”
All too familiar.
That is simply untrue. This claim originates in a misrepresentation of a footnote in an alleged leaked document that reads:
That does not say access to prostitutes is a human right. It say criminalizing the purchase of sex may be a violation of human rights. Those are not the same thing.
They are not the same thing in precisely the same way that
Marrying your cousin is a human right
and
Criminalizing cousins for marrying may be a violation of their human rights
are not equivalent statements.
For information on Amnesty’s actual stance on sex work see here, particularly question eight.
@ Silent Bob #3
Your semantic pedantry misses the point. Obviously those statements are not equivalent.
But why would it be a violation of a human right to prevent people paying for sex if paying for sex wasn’t a human right, or entailed by a human right?
Seems to me the new intersectionality has a pattern to it:
Protect sex work as an industry, protecting men’s demand to purchase control over female bodies.
Protect Islamists’ demand for Muslim men to maintain power over Muslim women.
Protect trans women’s demand to be recognized as women, so that men who love trans women will be acknowledged to be straight and males who declare themselves women have complete access to women’s spaces.
Huh. No. It must be a coincidence. It can’t possibly be that the new intersectionalism is… anti-feminist, can it?
Btw, the human need for sexual release is why making masturbation illegal would be a violation of human rights. Rights to other people is not really a thing.
Not sure on the complete veracity of that third one Samantha, but that seems to be at least some of the elements of the current dubious incarnation of intersectionality.
The human right in question is not so much access to prostitutes, but rather freedom to do what you want with your body, which of course includes prostitution.
@ Holmes #4
Firstly, the Amnesty statements in discussion are not about the bodily autonomy of prostituted people, but the right of people to access bodies for sex.
Secondly, bodily autonomy is actually more complex than that. The moment you SELL part or all of your body, bodily autonomy is undermined. If bodily autonomy is absolute, then your body as a whole or its parts can never rightfully be used instrumentally by another, which obviously includes buying and selling bodies or body parts. This is the sort of reasoning Immanuel Kant used to argue against the sale of body parts: in his day, rich people paid poor people to extract and sell their healthy teeth. It’s the same for selling organs and it’s the same for pregnancy surrogacy. It’s one thing to freely donate organs or act as surrogate for pregnancy, but quite another to be paid to do so. I believe it is also the same for prostitution. Prostitution is not the exercise of bodily autonomy but the undermining of it. It is to be paid to temporarily relinquish autonomy over your body. A person pays to gain temporary control of a body they would otherwise have no access to. And like teeth harvesting in Kant’s day, it’s the subordinated class that is being exploited for the benefit of the dominant class and it is the subordinated class that has to endure the pain, indignity and loss. It is not only a result of oppression, but the enactment of it.
Correction: that should be addressed to Holms #8. Apologies.
I can only suggest then that we will not agree on much in this discussion, as I do not agree that the selling automatically subverts the concept of autonomy.
@Holms #11. Since the thought experiment doesn’t seem to clarify it for you, I would suggest trying the actual real-world experiment. Sell yourself to some punter. Pay attention to how much autonomy you have while he’s using you. Then discuss.
^ Don’t be a snide wanker.