Active discussions

Please or to access all these features

Talk
Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Feminism: chat

Original poster

Laws that sex workers really want - anti-Nordic-model TED talk

153 replies

iismum · 18/03/2017 07:44

A friend of mine just posted this video - it's a TED talk by a sex worker discussing how a NZ model is what (according to her) pretty much all sex workers want. She discredits full and partial criminalisation of sex work - which I quite agree with. She also talks about how the Nordic model is really bad for sex workers, whereas I support the Nordic model. But she made some interesting points - particularly how the Nordic model does not reduce the demand for sex work, it just makes it more dangerous and fosters more negative attitudes to sex workers. Is this really true?

I'd be really interested to hear people's thoughts about it. If you want to skip to what she says about the Nordic model, it starts at about 6 minutes in.

www.ted.com/talks/juno_mac_the_laws_that_sex_workers_really_want

OP posts:
Original poster
iismum · 18/03/2017 10:35

Thanks a lot for that and for the pointer to the Bindel thread. I have several friends that feel so passionately about this and although I disagree with them, I feel I need to really know my facts to plausibly challenge them. Someone wrote about the SNP support for the Nordic model that champagne corks would be flying for evangelicals and women haters. It makes me so angry to dismiss people who are pro-Nordic model as women haters.

OP posts:
M0stlyBowlingHedgehog · 18/03/2017 08:20

I should also mention that even among prostitutes who say they went into prostitution as adults, of their own free choice, and are happy with their choice, there is disagreement as to whether full decrim is a good thing. We have had "freely consenting" (for want of a better phrase) prostitutes discuss their work on here in the past, and I certainly remember at least two who preferred the British compromise of criminalising pimping, because it maintained their independence and kept prices up. I even read one saying she liked working in countries where it was completely illegal, again because it kept prices up, and also because if the punters knew what they were doing could get them arrested, they had more of an incentive to behave (she said she had worked in a wide range of different countries under different legal frameworks).

M0stlyBowlingHedgehog · 18/03/2017 08:16

There's some excellent discussion on the Julie Bindel thread at the moment, here, particularly Micro's post of Fri 17-Mar-17 10:26:19 and Beachcomber's a few posts later.

Micro sets out the statistics in chilling detail.

I'll cut and paste my own contribution:

Those who've studied it reckon New Zealand only works (insofar as it works - and there's considerable evidence to suggest the picture is not as rosy as the pro-prostitution lobby would have us belief) because of its geographical isolation. In a country like Germany, a much better social and geographical analogue for the UK, the results of complete legalisation have been disasterous - increased trafficking, mega brothels (where despite the arguments of the pro lobby that this would lead to health care and proper employment contracts, women in fact have none of these protections and are forced to work as "independent contractors"), pop-up brothels on the edges of motorway restplatz where women have sex for 15 euros, and street prostitution still runs rampant (remember, the whole point was supposedly to make women safer), except that the price has now dropped to less than the cost of a big mac.

It's inherent in the nature of capitalism - commodify something and you drive down prices, and people get exploited in the production process. Only now the thing being commodified is women's bodies, and the prices have dropped to a couple of euros for servicing a man's cock on your knees in the gutter.