Economist article - 'The Sex Business'

Another thank you to AFG for that brilliant post.

Women are trained to say everything is fine and that they are doing just fine, because when women say "I am not fine! I am vulnerable!", especially from socially vulnerable positions, men's reaction is to mock or rape them. It's like a wounded animal trying desperately to act normal so that the rest of the pack won't tear it apart or abandon it.
YY, AFG

According to this gossip site the "empowered pornstar" Sasha Grey has said that she was forced into doing porn by her abusive boyfriend. And no one, who actually knows something about the industry, is suprised.

Another thanks to AFG.

I used to work with someone who volunteered with prostituted and recently exited women and she had some absolute horror stories. How may other 'careers' involve the 'contractor' finding herself in a situation where she believes she is about to be murdered at least once a fortnight?

I don't personally, or at least knowingly, know anyone who has worked as a prostitute but I have had friends who've worked as lap-dancers. One did it because she had no options. She was employed in the most-exclusive club of its type and hated every second. She got through it because she is a feminist and it fuelled her feminist convictions. Three others had options but bought into the 'sex work is exciting/rebellious/empowering/lucrative' stuff. Two dropped out pretty quickly after being disabused of these notions and the other got turned onto cocaine by her fellow dancers because that was the only way they could all make it through a shift without having their soul destroyed.

We have to stop selling this whole 'empowerment' and 'agency' thing. Why is it only applied to those 'careers' that reduce women to body-parts?

AFG thank you so much for explaining your experience so well. I read your blog, too, that you linked to on the other thread and found it very interesting.

As a former underage prostitute myself, I cannot abide people who want to claim that sex work is somehow "empowering."

Why? Because when I was a 17 year old prostitute, I was also taughttaught!to spout the "this is my choice and I am defying society!" line. I thought I was taking ownership of my sexuality. I thought I was saying a huge "fuck you" to the man.

It took years for the programming to fall out of my head. Years to realize what I'd actually been used for, and who had benefited from that. Years to get to know a lot of other prostitutes and strippers and such who had serious psychological problems because of what they were doing--and many of them still claimed to "love" their work.

Many of us, whether we are sex workers or not, decide to love what we do, even if it was not what we would first have wanted. Many women have chosen to love their husbands in arranged marriages. To love the husband chosen for you, or the one profession that is open to you in desperate times, can make things easier on a day to day basis. It is in us to love even captors and enslavers--Stockholm Syndrome is very real and applies to many women's relationships with pimps and madams.

But many of the sex workers I know who "love" what they're doing are also downing Xanax like there is no tomorrow, or have made special rules that their boyfriends can no longer touch certain parts of their bodies that now feel dirty and bad because of the way clients have touched them, or find themselves on inexplicable, frequent crying jags or having PTSD flashbacks. Then they go right back to telling people how everything is fine.

Women are trained to say everything is fine and that they are doing just fine, because when women say "I am not fine! I am vulnerable!", especially from socially vulnerable positions, men's reaction is to mock or rape them. It's like a wounded animal trying desperately to act normal so that the rest of the pack won't tear it apart or abandon it.

That is a really excellent point Ezinma.

Service my arse.

I am amazed there has not been a feminist twitter / social media storm about this article, it is such a disgrace.

I agree about the dryness and the dehumanisation. Especially as the writer seems positively aroused by the notion of Technology leading to Economic Benefits and contributing to Progress, in the sense of a more satisfying fuck for the punter.

The data can be put to use, though. For a start, they destroy the argument that sex workers sell a service, rather than a human being/body. In London, a white, thin woman with a D-cup bust can charge 50% more for the same 'service' than a black woman of average build who wears an A-cup. At that rate it wouldn't take long for a thin white prostitute's boob job to pay for itself.

Body shape, body mutilation, and economic discrimination based on race and appearance: if feminist critique is about anything, it is surely about this.

Whenever banning zero-hours contracts is mentioned the Tories always trot out the student who wants a zero-hours job to fit in with their studies, or the pensioner who is using a zero-hours job to top up their pension. The fact that 99% of people on zero-hours live with uncertainty, lack of income and the fuck-up end of a power dynamic is ignored because it works for a tiny, privileged few with other options and mainly because it works for the bosses.

We have to think about the women in Africa fucking fishermen for fish to take to market, or 17 year olds in Brazil who are pregnant with their fifth child, not the odd prostitute doing it to write a blog (though I have yet to come across a middle-class prostitute who doesn't have some severe 'daddy' issues or a history of body-hatred and self-harming).

That article is absolutely terrifying in its dehumanizations of women.
Chilling.

Unfortunately Seville, the type of man who buys women's consent isn't interested in stories of how horrible the average prostituted woman's life is, and there are enough 'happy hookers' about who merrily tell them that it's ok, that what they're doing is funding college places, keeping food on tables for children and so on.

These 'Happy Hookers' are loud, and, in time honoured tradition, if you don't agree with them completely, or present them with facts from other sources or even question them, you get accused of being a SWERF, of reducing women's agency and the whole industry swings in to discredit people like Rachel Moran.

You have to remember that the sex industry is enormous. It is worth a hell of a lot of money to the people who run it men and they will do anything and everything to ensure that they continue to make loads of money from the women.

Every single conversation about this becomes about how mean and nasty radfems are trying to take these women's agency away, how we're all moralistic idiots who don't enjoy sex, that we're too fat and ugly to have made it in the industry, blah blah blah. Even when those conversations were started to discuss the men in the transaction.

This statement of yours seems to suggest something similar - that prostitution is essentially on a par with casual sex, except that money changes hands - do you believe that?

God no. I don’t believe in the self serving myths of the happy hooker/pretty woman/hooker with a heart of gold/girlfriend experience. However all those self serving constructs are probably what at least half the johns are buying into, to a greater or lesser extent. If not as imagined reality then at least as self deluded possibility. Based on contact I had with a few dozen johns over the years I would forgive a third of them, because they seemed dysfunctional toward women, it was not that they hated or devalued them per se, they seemed pitiable. Another third, the kind basil talked about, were just plain evil, a whore was a woman but a real woman was not a whore, so to speak. Men with a proper and good wife and a whore or three to service them in whatever way they expected. Nasty pieces of work.

It's a very house-style Economist article; I'm surprised she used "frustrated". A later sentence is more objectively phrased:

"In the long term there will always be people who, for whatever reason, want to hire a prostitute rather than do without sex or pick up a partner in a bar. "

Yy Basil.

The whole thing ignores the basic reason men (ab)use prostitutes, rather than going in for no-strings sex with a woman who isn't prostituted - the power imbalance paying gives them.

DWH - I think what Seville was getting at is that hook up sites are sited as a reason for the decrease in the use of prostitutes which implies that the casual sex is a replacement for the use of prostitutes. Where once men would have paid a woman for sex, women are now giving it to them for free. The issue here is the connection the writer draws between the two, which implies that what goes on between a man and a prostitute is essentially no different to what goes on between two people hooking up through Tindr, ie that one is an adequate replacement for the other. The implication is that being a prostitute is no different to looking for casual sex, except that prostitutes get paid, ie women look for casual sex are essentially unpaid prostitutes.

You could look at that the other way around of course - the implication is that prostitutes are simply women who get casual sex that they genuinely want but they also get paid for it, lucky things!

"Prostitution writes that out of the picture but, I suppose, even then it does not totally because the 'holy grail' for many a john seems to be that the prostitute really enjoys having sex with him so much she refuses payment."
This statement of yours seems to suggest something similar - that prostitution is essentially on a par with casual sex, except that money changes hands - do you believe that?

So does this mean women looking for casual sex are unpaid prostitutes?

Utterly bizarre question. Almost as if asking it presupposes women do not lust and if they do their lust is devalued as a form of coin. Good sex does not require commitment, it requires a decent level of mutual care that sex is fulfilling. The only bad casual sex I ever had was bad not because I failed to get off but because I failed to get my partner off.

Prostitution writes that out of the picture but, I suppose, even then it does not totally because the 'holy grail' for many a john seems to be that the prostitute really enjoys having sex with him so much she refuses payment.