Empowered by 'sex work'

Tell them to spend a full afternoon reading reviews on Punternet and then get back to you.

Apologies for random words appearing there!!

Empowerment through sex work is usually the reason given why there shouldn't be regulation. So let's agree with these people and say that the majority of women in sex work are there freely and having the time of their lives and have found their vocation...but what about the others?

We have laws about wearing seatbelts to protect everybody, even though most of us will never crash.

If you enter a building site you need a hard hat, even though most people won't bang their heads or have something land on them.

When you take off on a plane there's always that annoying security announcement, even though most planes will not crash.

We generally base rules and regulations about protecting people on the most vulnerable, or lethal threat to a tiny minority. These rules inconvenience the majority, yet we don't complain about them, they're accepted as normal. So why are the most vulnerable sex workers ignored? Do people who talk about either empowerment of sex work think that only the sex workers who feel empowered count?

And, of course, the majority of sex workers are not empowered through what they have to do.

So I'd ask why these people arguing that the empowerment of some sex workers is more important than the safety of them all, in particular the most vulnerable.

It's tricky. My friend works as a web cam and also dominatrix and adores it. We both model lingerie - nude but I don't class that as sex work
However we have both had bad experiences with clients/photographers

Gosh, please excuse the incorrect apostrophe in my post above.

Any mention of shame or degradation seems to equate to me being a prim old maid who thinks womens bodies are shameful. It's the commodification and degradation by men of womens bodies I find shameful but since it's the woman's choice who am I to judge?

I think for a lot of people this comes down to basic difference in the way they think about sex, and maybe also how they think about work.

The POV these people are coming from is that sex is no different than any other bodily activity, it isn't special, it's not any more about love or intimacy, or more personal. They tend to think that "bad" prostitution is like working in a sweat shop - it's the conditions and exploitation, not the thing itself. So they also tend to think that the real reason we end up with so many problems with sex work is that we attach too much importance to sex, we still see it as different or special, we have left-over hang-ups from religion etc. If we could get over those, we could create conditions where that wouldn't happen.

A lot of the problem "regular" people have when they think about this is that they basically are happy with the idea that sex, as long as there is consent, is ok and no ones business. Anonymous sex, same sex sex, kinky sex, one night stands, friend's with benefits. And they instinctively feel that if they admit that it's possible that sex isn't quite the same as ditch digging, those things might not seem quite the same either.

I would say that the radical feminist viewpoint is really quite good at pointing out the experienced realities and systemic pressures involved in sex work. But what they often don't offer people is a clear argument or idea or sense of what makes sex different than other things. I've wondered if that's a totally honest omission or not, but in any case I think it tends to leave a gap when trying to convince people.

Any mention of shame or degradation seems to equate to me being a prim old maid who thinks womens bodies are shameful.

Don't talk about shame and degradation, which idiots don't care about. I talk about trauma and PTSD, measurable and worse than combat veterans.

Yes I have found most men are pro prostitution.

You then say so you would be happy for your wife, daughter, mother, sister to have as a career option? They then go er um er well no.

What they are saying is they are happy for women who are caught in the poverty cycle to do that job, not their family silly!?

This is something I struggle to discuss with those who think it is empowering. Thank you for what you shared dumonde - that is so real.
Every fibre of me feels that sex work, prostitution, pornoraphy, are so hurtful to women and society. Yet I find myself surrounded by men and women who think it is all fun and empowering and I really do feel unable to respond adequately to their arguments.

Any mention of shame or degradation seems to equate to me being a prim old maid who thinks womens bodies are shameful. It's the commodification and degradation by men of womens bodies I find shameful but since it's the woman's choice who am I to judge?
I had someone argue that we all sell our bodies if we work, we just sell our muscles to stack beans or dig roads etc, and if I think selling my vagina is different to selling my arm and leg muscles that's just my hang-ups about my genitals. I still haven't worked out the answer to that one.

DuMondeB thank you for sharing. An incredibly powerful read.

I would ask them to follow the money. Who benefits when people believe that sex work is all empowering and sexy and fun?

Honestly the marketing of the sex industry in recent years has been exceptional. They should be doing case studies on it in business schools and I'm not surprised people are falling for it.

The reality of course...

I would ask them to explain exactly and clearly in what way they are empowered by sex work.

That, of course, excludes earning money, which can be done by any other job and is not exclusive to prostitution.

I also like to focus on the customer rather than the prostitute.

Rather than 'empowering for women'... what kind of man wants to stick his cock in the mouth, vagina or anus of someone he knows for a fact wouldn't consent without cash? A rapist, that's who. If you have sex with someone who doesn't want to have sex with you... that's who you are.

The whole industry is based on serving rapists. Not empowering.

but someone always pulls out the exception to the rule (e.g. the Belle de Jour type wearing agent provocateur in posh hotels and working to fund her PhD) as a counter argument against the lack of choice/disadvantaged women arguement.

And I always say OK, take away poor women, trafficked women, women who started this underage, addicted women, women with abusive partners, women abused in childhood and homeless women... how many women do you think are left? They would be millionaires. Because there wouldn't be 5 quid blows jobs with none of those women available. There wouldn't be ugly, smelly, dirty, violent men getting sex because those women would be able to choose. There wouldn't be mega brothels or red lights districts.

The whole industry runs on abuse, addiction and poverty. Not empowerment.

@DuMondeB I have no words, but I heard you and what you said was powerful.

As them what exactly does empowerment mean to them? What power does a prostituted woman gain? Does she have power in the real world? Power to change her life, improve things she doesn't like? Prostituted women sadly are very often shunned by society as a whole, woke spaces notwithstanding.

Ask them if they think it's right for a man to pay for a woman for access to her vagina and mouth. Do they think he is empowered by the transaction?

Tell them what you know. They've bought into a fantasy, they clearly have no idea what prostitution is really like. You can tell them as you do know wat it is really like.

Finally, why isn't prostitution a man's choice? Male prostitutes are vanishingly rare, If it's so empowering, men would be doing it. Instead they get real power, running businesses, becoming politicians, owning vast areas of land.

It must be hard when it's your friends though.

DuMonde

Sometimes I think that it can be helpful, instead of trying to think of the best argument for your own POV, is to try and think about the weaknesses, or the ways in which the other POV is most convincing. It makes it possible to really make a much stronger argument that really addresses the concerns of the other perspective.

A real concern people have about the view you have of sex work is where do you draw the line in saying that people have no agency, and what would be the consequences of that. For example, one argument says that the nature of sex work is so prone to exploitation that it isn't really possible to allow it in a safe way. I tend to think this is probably the simplest argument to make that can work for people who have varying views about the nature of sex for money - everyone understands that some types of business may to too prone to exploitation to allow, and so justify curtailing people's personal choices, even if in some ideal cases it might be fine. If you make this though argument someone can suggest that certain systems or regulation might reduce the problems enough that it should be allowed.

On the other hand, if you want to argue that no one can reasonably make choices about sex for money, ever, that may have a lot of other implications about the choices people can make. What about stripping, or being nude in a non-porn film, etc. What about unpaid sexual activity, are their things people can't consent to and are we comfortable telling people that, making laws about it? What about pay for other things that could be dangerous, does that compromise our choices?

There are a lot of assumptions that go unspoken about these things in such discussions, but they affect people's sense of what the right answer is anyway. So if you can address them in a discussion it can help people think a different way about it.

Julie Bindel is of course right, but those who don't want to see it just reply that we don't have the right to determine what other women can do with their bodies...

Julie Bindel said it best, I think. A woman's orifice is not a workplace.

Springfern I agree with them that there are some who are truly empowered. But then what about the ones who aren't? As sex trafficking is bigger business than drug dealing, and they themselves usually are not people (nor are their friends) who would consider it even as a weekend hobby to feel empowered, then it stands to reason that there are a LOT of women who don't get the choice to say No and not suffer as a result.

It's also useful to separate out the difference between not judging a woman for having been, or being, some kind of sex worker, empowered or not, and saying that the industry, run by men, is not empowering. Women who are sex workers of any type have to keep their wits about them in a way most of us simply couldn't do daily. There's frequently this idea that people like me pity or judge these women as stupid or in some way inferior. I absolutely don't (as I sense you don't either) and try to convey that.

But I DEFINITELY judge middle class woke folk who think it's empowering..for poor women. If they worked for a pimp at weekends themselves, after the ritual rape and beating and threats, so they know who is boss, to get themselves more empowered I'd be more inclined to think of them differently.

Wow @DuMondeB that’s makes very powerful reading.

I say they are using a lazy argument to avoid doing anything concrete or constructive to assist poor women who don't want to have to enter prostitution in the first place.

Promiscuity, whether paid or not, is an individual choice. The happy whore phall(ic)acy is driven by people who are content to be promiscuous and have control over who they take money from and the manner of that transaction. This is not the vast majority of prostituted women's reality.

Actual prostitution not a glamorized intagrammed pretty woman approximation of the experience is sex slavery and is not a choice for anyone other than the slave driving John's who keep these women, women like us, our sisters, in chains of desperation and misery.

Sucking filthy dick, trying to stop mem removing condoms, living minute to minute trying to stay alive, get out of cars when your gut is telling you danger, is not empowering, it's desperation talking, whether driven by poverty or addiction. It's total helplessness and vulnerability.