For those who like to declare that "sex work" is empowering

The next video in the BBC player is also horrific - sex workers in Sierra Leone. They’re calling themselves sex workers, while they explain that a friend was taken the day before and a “customer” cut her feet off.

Oh give over spring soda. I'm a sex worker, you know an actual one. Not just an ally. Mumsnet is perfectly accepting of sex workers voices, providing they can actually engage and don't shy away from difficult questions.

I've had my arse handed to me numerous times, I work in a strip club. I love it. It benefits me and my lifestyle a lot. Does that mean the sex industry isn't incredibly damaging to women and society. No, it does not. It just makes me a hypocrite.

But at least I admit that. I know that I'm the lucky end of the wedge. I know that the educated stripper trope of just paying for uni is the 1%. The 99% is women who have no choice. Who are working on the streets, who have addiction and trauma.

Great analogies earlier with smoking and fossil fuels etc. Just because something has always been done a certain way does not mean it should continue like that. We evolve, we grow we hopefully progress as a human race. Hopefully one day the idea of renting a womans body for sexual pleasure or as an incubator will be abhorrent.

It's males paying females or males to own (rape) their body for a temporary basis. The servant isn't doing it for sexual gratification, they are doing it because they need money.

Males should have moved on from this, without poor male behaviour this wouldn't exist.

@Springsoda you must not be in the U.K., because some of the things you mention (eg healthcare) are not an issue here.

I’d ask you though: why do you think selling sex should be a legal industry just because it’s what you personally want to do? Should everyone be able to do whatever they want and makes them money, even if less fortunate others, and society more broadly, suffer harm as a result? It’s a very right wing, US-centric view of society, isn’t it?

I don’t happen to think that a few women’s desire to sell sex trumps the desperate exploitation and suffering of many others, or believe that a bit of capitalist “regulation” around taxes makes a horrifically immoral, violent, objectifying and damaging “trade” suddenly shiny and lovely and not exploitative.

It’s a very naive view of market capitalism you have there. It’s funny that centuries of degrading sexual exploitation in prostitution, and the concomitant violence, misogyny and poverty, could now be sorted by magic capitalism with a little light regulation of the tax and licensing systems. What marvels late capitalism has brought us!

Will all the violent johns and pimps and addiction and trafficking all melt away and buying sex suddenly become a respectful transactional contract just like getting one’s nails done, with a lovely man who just wants a cuddle and a chat and wouldn’t dream for a moment of anything at all violent or degrading?

Or might it just possibly be that men being able to purchase women like slaves is inherently linked to violence, exploitation, misogyny, poverty, abuse, trafficking and disease, no matter what the “happy escorting” myths might pretend?

@foxgoosefinch It would work much in the same way as the agency (well there's more than 2 of us so I guess it's a brothel). We are licensed, you have to have a license to work as an escort here. Regular testing, rates, menus set by service providers. We can put any clients on our no see list. Fair house fees. The main difference would be we could legally keep & share info about clients. We do this already but we have to keep it on the down low. We would be eligible for group Healthcare &;we wouldn't have to lie on our taxes about how we earn our money.

Legally, the law doesn't care if a brothel has a pimp or not. If it's illegal for sex workers to work together, then brothels can and will be raided by police to arrest the women working there.

And on that note I'm curious what your experience is of sex work @MargaritaPie

Mine is having shared a house with two women who were in sex work (separate women and houses), worked with countless women and boys who worked. Helped collate the information for the women of rapes, assaults, kidnapping and robberies. Counselled and supported women who died from the fallout of their work. Was a witness in a trial which involved an attack on a sex worker. I could go on.

And you?

Please don't fucking explain sex work to me. I was working with sex workers when all the libfems were babies. 30 fucking years ago I was witnessing horrible abuse of young sex workers and I still am.

I'm saying we CAN define brothels how we'd like. And the bad thing about brothels is pimps. And location. Which can be decided with proper town planning.

"The police and courts are also sexist misogynists"

The police aren't the ones who made the laws. Blame the politicians who decided women should still be criminalised for working together when they passed the Nordic Model in Sweden/Ireland etc.

"Brothel keeping should be defined properly. Involving a pimp"

I think some people misunderstand what a brothel is and think a brothel is only a brothel if there's a pimp/madam in charge of the sex workers. If there's 2 or more sex workers working there then it's a brothel regardless if there's a pimp involved or not, and they don't even need to be working at the same time.

Brothel keeping should be defined properly. Involving a pimp. Rather than several women having room on common with shared protection they hire if necessary.

Honestly though, don't pretend your actual concern is women and girls. It's repulsive.

In Nordic-Model Ireland, more sex workers have been arrested for working in a brothel than clients have been arrested for paying for sex.

Any comment to make on this?

"How's about instead we allow brothels and still crim Johns and pimps? You know, like the Nordic model actually is"

That isn't the Nordic Model at all. Under the Nordic-Model, sex workers are criminalised for working together (ie "running a brothel"). Ireland has increased the penalites for sex workers working together since introducing the Nordic Model.

news.sky.com/story/hundreds-arrested-for-running-brothels-as-sex-workers-say-its-the-laws-that-are-criminal-12117653

www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/republic-of-ireland/crime-against-sex-workers-almost-doubles-since-law-change-37957334.html

In Nordic-Model Ireland, more sex workers have been arrested for working in a brothel than clients have been arrested for paying for sex.

*"Kate McGrew, sex worker and director of Sex Workers Alliance Ireland (SWAI) says the new laws have created a buyer’s market, putting workers at risk.

“The purchasers of sex hold the power, this is in direct opposition to what we were told was the intention of the law,” she said.

“Sex workers are not decriminalised.

“The penalties of sex workers sharing premises together, also known as brothel keeping, has doubled since the introduction of the new Sexual Offences Bill in 2017.

“Sex workers are now forced to work in isolation, which puts them at further risk of violence and exploitation.

“Since the law has been introduced many more sex workers have been arrested than clients.

“We want sex work decriminalised so that the power gets put back in the hands of the worker.”"*

You’re an enthusiastic cheerleader for women’s sexual exploitation, who repeats so many daft ideas over and over again, that either you must be astonishingly thick or just get off on the idea. Which is it?

I mean it's a position.

How's about instead we allow brothels and still crim Johns and pimps? You know, like the Nordic model actually is?

"In countries that have brought in the Nordic Model, sex workers have not, as is often promised, been ‘decriminalised’. Brothel-keeping – which is defined as two or more people working together – remains a crime, forcing women to work alone or risk arrest. When police raid workplaces with the stated aim of arresting clients, it is repeatedly sex workers who are charged"

From above link.

"The model sex work groups advocate for"* I meant to post.

The model sex work groups (British orgs include Scot-Pep, Umbrella Lane, English Collective of Prostitutes etc) is decriminalisation which NZ has. This model is also supported by many human rights, anti-trafficking, health and anti-STD orgs.

There's a list of signatures at the end of this letter if that helps.
decrimnow.org.uk/open-letter-on-the-nordic-model/

Germany is mentioned on here a lot, but Germany is not decriminalisation.

👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

What would a “properly regulated and supported” sex work industry look like then, @Springsoda?

The evidence from countries that have tried this suggest a regulated sex industry makes things less good for the women and less safe, rather than more - cf. Germany.

It’s very touching to put such faith in capitalism to “regulate” dangerous or immoral or exploitative industries. A bit like saying that trafficked Chinese workers picking cockles would be just fine if we could get Amazon to take over managing their employment rights.

And tell me, if an industry is exploitative, wrong and commodifying of our basic humanity, why is it we need to ask sex workers anyway? We don’t ask the employees of Shell to dictate policy on climate change, nor the cleaners at a tobacco company if we should ban smoking, or child sweatshop workers what employment rights would make child labour a bit better. We decide that some things are unhealthy and wrong for us as humans, and we restrict what can be bought and sold accordingly.

We’d rightly ignore it if the Chinese cocklepickers’ collective agitated for the right to be paid half the minimum wage on the grounds that they freely chose to be treated illegally at work. But notice that only when men’s ability to dehumanise women’s bodies is involved, that everyone’s so keen to talk about hearing “voices” that legitimate prostitution by claiming it as a “choice”.

And particularly, on the left where so many useful idiots have lost their heads about this issue, you will find nothing more right wing, individualist, capitalist and market-obsessed than the “SWIW” lot on this issue. All leftist thought flies out the window when it’s a woman’s body that is getting commodified and corporatised, and all the shrieky “progressives” are suddenly all for the idea of sex work as gutsy little small business operations - for all the world like so many tinpot Maggie Thatchers in defence of the small time paid rape “industry”.

Marxism for bros, capitalist oppression for hos - quite quite literally.

Hopefully some questions are not perceived as being "jumped on", nor a pointless activity...?

Can you say why Mumsnet is not a place that the voices of women involved in prostitution can be safely heard?

Would you see any issues with men paying women for sex, even if it was regulated and supported as you'd like? Would you consider it to have a neutral or positive impact on women and society, if it were regulated and regarded in the same way as employment/industry?

At the risk of being jumped on I have to agree that there is a huge difference between sex trafficking and sex work. The reason so many sex workers are in danger is that the industry is largely unregulated and unsported. There is an important discussion to be had around the industry but mumsnet is not the place, it simply does not hold space for sex workers voices to be heard.