privilege and prostitution

Exactly it's not about poor unattractive men who can't get a real relationship. Here is a good example - this young man is not very ugly and could easily get into bed with any of his countless adoring fans:
www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/03/justin-bieber-brothel_n_4208424.html
It's about seeing others/women as things (not people) that you should be able to use if/how you want. Sociopath thinking, real or learned.
That it's the root of the problem.

I also don't think people should confuse themselves over the reasons that men buy "sex". It most likely has nothing to do with a man's attractiveness, or lack of, and everything to do with entitlement and power. In other words, attractive men often buy prostitutes whereas other men, not so attractive, may choose not to.

That original quote doesn't make sense because it's overwhelmingly men who buy people (women). So the issue of "the only way they can get laid is by paying for it" basically applies to men. Which is why it's strange that the author of the quote appears to be addressing young women with boyfriends.
The prostitute is unlikely to find the punter attractive, so we're not even really talking about "sex" in a boyfriend/girlfriend scenario. Just the buying of a body by a privileged male with more income than the woman he's purchasing.

I too have just skim read a few points but I felt some were worth commenting on.

A poster a few pages back said something about asking what prostitutes want to happen regarding the law, and I know I've said this many times before but the only thing I want is safety and the law which stops more than one sex worker working from a house is ridiculous and dangerous.

I agree with others who have said that punters are punters because they choose to be punters. Most, if not all, the punters I see are married, middle aged men who don't bother to remove their wedding ring or even take calls off their wife while sat on the bed. Not all of them are attractive but they do have another option to have a sex life. The reality is they want a young 20 something, white British girl who is a size 8 with long brown hair and blue eyes. They know they would never be able to pull someone who ticks all those boxes, and as we live in such a consumer society, they go out and pay for exactly what they want. The men want it so the women sell it.

You can't buy intimacy and most of them don't want the intimacy, they just want the sex, to act out fantasies and to do stuff their wives won't do (I hear the last phrase pretty much every day). For those who want an intimate experience, it can be replicated. The GFE (girl-friend experience) is the closest you'll get, of course it's all an act but they can pretend that the girl is into them.

Trafficking is awful, and I don't know how the police can crack down on it. I can only hope that any punter who saw a trafficked girl would report it, but I doubt that he would due to the legalities of it all (am I right to think he could be prosecuted for seeing a trafficked person?).

I don't think anyone has a right to sex. I can understand how frustrating it may be to be stuck in a sexless marriage for years but from my experiences the men I see don't fall into that category (I know this because I will hear how their wife is x amount of weeks pregnant and gone off sex, or just had a baby and says they are too tired etc.) I do feel bad for their wives and almost feel like telling them to stop seeing prostitutes and spend time and pay attention to their other half, it'd probably fall on deaf ears though.

Sorry for the rant guys, it's late and I'm finally off to bed, night!

I really don't want to get drawn into this again, the last time this topic came up and I engaged it was depressing as all hell. Which even as insulated as I am from from this side of life makes me genuinely fear for people for whom this is their lived reality.

Apologies I only skimmed this thread so I am sure I missed some salient points, but I caught the bit up thread on trafficking, and I would like to challenge the way we legally define it. There ARE plenty of women who make the choice to be sex workers and migrate to countries like ours (UK), and in order to break into the industry have to put up with agencies and brothels who take what is my view a quite frankly obscene percentage.

As a result of this, this isn't defined as trafficking so of course when raids happen they don't find hordes of women whom have been legally defined as trafficked as there is an element of choice, but the fact remains that people who enter into it find their boundaries pushed in terms of how many people they see and what services they have to offer. As the money they believe they can make turns out to be an illusion.

I get the safety issue of two independent sex workers teaming up to provide one another with added security which all sounds very well on paper, but in the same breath you make it a million times easier for people to exploit the vulnerable too. I believe that sex workers themselves shouldn't be criminalised, but those who seek to exploit them and market sex on a mass scale by exploiting those who would choose to sell it often gets obscured. This SHOULD be in my opinion a key area to look at in terms of legislation and protection.

I confess I don't understand the economics of it, but an escort agency running a website and maybe hiring a handful of people to man a phone line neither of which are particularly expensive to setup and maintain doesn't in my view justify the amount they take off what amounts to other people's work.

As a parting shot when people talk about this magical sexual experience that nobody should be robbed of experiencing, I think we're confusing sex and intimacy here. What I am seeing being described often is intimacy. You can have intimacy without sex, and you can have sex without intimacy. You can of course also have both. Whilst it is possible to buy sex I think it is by definition impossible to buy intimacy, sure you can buy the illusion of it and if you are willing to do the mental gymnastics required you can kid yourself into thinking you have it, but I think most people deep down know the truth.

I cannot for the life of me think of why a man who is not an active punter would go to the effort of tracking down the type of information they post here. The men I know who are in favour of legalisation or decriminalisation are, at best, half-hearted in their views and will waffle about either harm reduction or people's rights in their own bodies but they do listen to the arguments and either agree somewhat, say it's all too complicated and/or get bored. I know one guy who is very vocal about "sex workers' rights" but he lives with a woman who is a "sex worker activist" which must play a part.

I'm now at the stage that any man who is interested in prostitution issues to the extent that he uses the go-to punter arguments (Melissa Farley rape jokes, Rachel Moran is a liar, Operation Pentameter, Petite Jasmine etc.) has to be a punter. The only reason to be so invested in this issue and also so black and white on it is if you are trying to justify your own behaviour.

There's a comment from a man on the original link:

So ugly, creepy men’s desire for sex outweighs the sexual exploitation of women?

Because not all men are creepy punter-types. Why doesn't the man who posted ^ that invade here? Better things to do probably

ezina on the point about privilege, it's more of the same double speak that's typical of the punter lobby. Women hate prostitution because they are ugly or they are beautiful or because they hate sex or think it's a spiritual experience. Prostitution is just a job or access to prostitutes is a human need. Prostitution is not harmful or prostitution is harmful and it needs to be legal to be safer. Women are at risk of harm from punters or let's increase access for punters to women.

They don't have a coherent theory about prostitution. They're just monkeys banging on keyboards until one of them randomly bangs out something resembling an argument then they all pounce on it and gibber on about it.

Ah well! Threads evolve, and when the more erudite women share their knowledge it's always a pleasure to read. I just have no time for puntertrolls and there seems to be a depressingly large number of them at the moment.

Did you see what I did there? I did exactly what you lot always do- dismiss a prostitute as "not representative" if she doesn't say what you want to hear.

Good lord. How is it possible to have so little self-awareness?

He'll argue next that Rochdale and Oxford weren't trafficking - despite the perpetrators being convicted of.... sex trafficking.

It was probably him under a previous name, capt.

I can't remember if this particular punter said that that person was lying or wasn't trafficked, despite her entrance into prostitution meeting his previously stated yardstick for having been trafficked. They all kind of merge into one sickening blob after a while.

Of course, that's just the women and children who are, by definition, trafficked.

It doesn't include the women who may argue that they are there by choice - but dig a little deeper, and you find out that sum total of their 'choice' in the matter was being desperate and in debt - until a "friend" comes along and offers them a miraculous way of getting themselves out of debt (whilst generously taking a 40% cut for himself)...

Oh good, the punter is still here. Still trying to have the same circular argument. Still not listening, still producing spurious 'facts'. Totally unable to stretch his tiny punter mind to class analyses.

Anyway.

Back to the actual thread.

Prostitution and privilege. Discuss.

How about this? Or these?

Or how about this from the Telegraph? Telegraph got a feminist axe to grind now, has it?

Many women in abusive relationships defend their partners actions and support them. It doesn't mean the abuser is in the right!
So many prostitutes defend pimps and punters it doesn't mean being a pimp or punter is right.

Gilo - are you familiar with the Rochdale cases? Or the Oxford cases?

Or our "bumsnet," as you call us, guest blog?

Do you understand that prostitutes don't actually like you? They don't respect you and they don't want to have sex with you.

"I do want prostitutes who don't want to prostitutes to be rescued"

And how many are there? Why can't we find them despite all these raids?

I don't really want to rescue prostitutes who want to be there. But I do want prostitutes who don't want to prostitutes to be rescued. And I don't want a legitimised market for women's bodies to be enshrined in law - for the sake of me and my daughter, and all women as a class. Because where traffickers see a market for selling and profiting from women's body - they will.