Disabled 'deserve' the joy of sex.

If there are most prostitutes than punters, why do I keep reading here about prostitutes having to service 20 dicks a day?

You're right. There are more prostitutes than punters though and always have been. The 'free market' principle is thriving even more in the internet age, where sites exist for punters to swap 'reviews' on prostitutes and share tips on how to get a woman to do more for less. If she won't, there will always be someone who will and other punters helpfully direct eachother to them. Sex workers also use the sites to compete for trade.

"In all capitalist and patriarchical societies, the purchaser has more power than the seller."

Surely that is only true in a saturated market where a lot of sellers compete for few buyers. Unless all my business textbooks are wrong

Was that link to a Twitter feed/blog meant to be a serious counter-argument to the laws in Sweden SGB?

Ah yes, the model.

No, SGB what the patriarchy likes most is women having to be dependent on men for their survival. Prostitution - unlike any other job in the service industry - positions men as the purchasers and women as the sellers. In all capitalist and patriarchical societies, the purchaser has more power than the seller. As long as we have a patriarchical society therefore, it will never be defensible to legalise prostitution because selling sex always invests the power in men.

Quite apart from the ideological and political argument that a society that tolerates people paying for sex is retrograde, unjust and iniquitous with equal treatment, in practical terms legalisation doesn't work.

Societies that have attempted to legalise prostitution without tackling the more strategic picture of patriarchy, capitalist structures, organised crime, money laundering, human trafficking and illegal immigration have found that abuse of prostitutes (as well as other crimes) has thrived and worsened since legalisation whereas more progressive societies like Sweden whose pro-feminist government took a more holistic approach and criminalised the purchase of sex 13 years ago have reported a huge cultural shift in society's attitudes towards prostitution. Public attitude surveys in Sweden confirm that men who pay for sex are now derided in society and regarded as misogynist and criminal. There is also very little evidence of the sinister 'underground' prostitution that nay-sayers pre-1999 (people in the sex industry of course) predicted.

It is naive and blinkered to view prostitution in a vacuum without considering the wider political picture. It's also frankly deluded to describe sex work as 'highly skilled' or to pretend that the seller has the power in the transaction, unlike any other market economy in any part of the world. If there are no buyers there can be no sellers and that is why criminalising purchase works.

there's nothing subversive about taking money to let men have sex with you. it's just the ultimate enactment of the power structure.

i can't bring myself to overly worry about those high earning women taking a dent in their earning capacity over the real victims of a society where men are indulged in the right to 'buy' sex sgb. to me it would be like worrying about poor factory owners in light of the minimum wage or something.

the bottom line is that patriarchy wants women to be for sale in one form or another with prostitution as it's most direct and cheapest purchase that reinforces and loudly declares women's place as the sex class that exists to service men.

being given money to do it bare bones or being given a wedding ring and the promise of avoiding the 'stigma' of single parenthood etc etc. but prostitution as it's ultimate declaration of 'what women are for'.

I posted that in a rush as DS wanted to use the computer. WHat the patriarchy hates is the idea of the willing, high-earning sex-worker: every change in the law that's proposed is one that will hit these sex workers hard, and make it almost impossible for sex workers to work safely (not allowed to work together, for instance, not allowed to have friends, helpers etc or these people will be charged with aiding-and-abetting type offences). Because the bottom line is that the patriarchy thinks women should just allow men to have sex on them, and not expect anything in return, and that every woman's sexual self needs to be owned by a man, so it needs to be kept as difficult, dangerous and horrible as possible for a woman to earn money for performing sex and to do this with different men rather than belonging to one.

also note i said i want the johns and the pimps criminalised rather than the women.

nah the patriarchy loves sex workers - they like their dicks sucked, they like to fuck young girls, they like to have women grind on their laps and they like all of this cheap and on tap. as an added bonus they know that the existence of the sex industry keeps all women in their place.

You know, the patriarchy hates sex workers. THe patriarchy wants sex workers to be kept stigmatized, exploited and coerced as a way of keeping other women under control.

i'd much rather just make buying sex illegal and criminalise every john and pimp and throw them in jail and protect those girls myself.

so whilst it starts with that and tries to improve things so more women will want to be whores another generation of young girls is coerced, abused and exploited for what? to preserve men's rights to buy sex? i'm lost as to why/where/how the fuck it's worth it.

Working on the 'supply/demand' issues that lead to coercion and exploitation should start with the issue of workers' rights, not an insistence on stigmatizing the entire line of work as beyond redemption.

nope sgb - there is no shortage of chickens, you can just breed more. there is a shortage of women willing to be fucked by twenty men a night with a smile on their face.

i've explained it all above solid. you can't ignore the supply/demand issues that mean it will always need the bulk of it's 'workers' to be coerced and abused.

Saf: I still don't get your point. The aim is to improve the conditions under which sex work is done, so that no one is doing it involuntarily or in unsafe or coerced circumstances. People who are in favour of sex work are not in favour of coercion and harm and exploitation of sex workers. Your argument seems to be along the lines of, someone expresses a wish to raise freerange chickens and sell organic eggs, so you tell them to go and work in a battery farm.

i suppose if you really wanted you could get her to send all of her clients to you in your nice premises that night so long as you charged them the same amount as she would and didn't turn any of them as she wouldn't and did all the same 'work' as you put it as she would.

i wouldn't begrudge you that.

because the desperate and coerced are an essential part of prostitution as demonstrated several times on here.

so you don't get one without the other. so why should you get to cherry pick?

IAOS: Many people who pay for sex don't consider they have bought a person - rather than bought the person's time and a pre-set, negotiated amount of it, half as much as some corporations seem to think they can. The client who pays the sex worker for a sexual service goes home at the end of it and the sex worker either waits for the next client, or goes home. Quite a lot of corporations these days seem to run on an ethos of owning employees to the extent that they demand control over what employees do 24/7, even when not at work.

SaF: why should those of us who think that sex work could and should be made safer and more honorable prove our point by going and engaging in the riskiest and least pleasant kind of sex work? We know that streetwalking sex work is dangerous and unhealthy and only done by the desperate and the coerced.

i actually think everyone who reckons they are pro prostitution and wouldn't have a problem with it should go down to their local red light district tonight and relieve a girl of her duties for the evening (obviously give her the money though so she doesn't get battered by her pimp or go into hideous withdrawals).

yes if we get to a point of no rape, dv, murder of women etc and equal pay and opportunities in all areas then i'm happy to have a vote and see how many women want to be fucked for a living and how many men want to fuck them and see if it looks any more feasible then.