How is it possible to be a feminist and support the sex industry?

I initially thought that MissHoneyMoon was a man from her writing style. But I no longer think she is a man, as I said before I think she is for real. Obviously what I think is not proof, but Sakura I think you are wrong about MissHoneyMoon.

Sakura asks a central question, would anyone like their daughter to become a prostitute? But does the answer to that give us the right to close down prostitution for women like MissHoneyMoon, who do want to do it?

I am still trying to find out the answer about the legality of the flat-owners who own the premises where prostitution is being carried out. Are these owners "controlling for gain" i.e. are they carrying out an illegal activity? I have googled to try to find this and ended up on the prostitutescollective website. On that website the women are very angry, just like MissHoneyMoon is, with what they say is an alliance between "government feminists and Christian fundamentalists" who are trying to restrict their business. It is clear from that website, that they think that the "government feminists" are not listening to their views. So I can understand MissHoneyMoon's anger because she is arguing for her choice to be allowed.

It does seem that the emphasis seems to be on targetting the men who use prostitutes rather than targetting prostitution per se. If the goal is to stop the practise of prostitution, then I am not sure how effective that will really be. It seems to me it is a bit like trying to stop gambling by allowing all the casinos to remain open, and being allowed to open up new outlets anywhere, and then trying to prosecute any customers who try and enter. Wouldn't it be better to shut down all casinos as well?

Sorry, one more reply to Sakura - I know I've cross-posted a bit, sorry. I also think that while MissHM's tone is aggressive in many posts, it's not so in all - she is replying to aggression, and wasn't the one to start it, if you look back. And I must say that the person who to me is being particularly dismissive and disdainful of both MissH's and MandaMM's opinions here is actually Dittany. She believes the discussion is being sidetracked and misled by trolls, hence her words, but still I am surprised that you can point the finger only at one side.

We're having some really interesting discussions here, both with MissHM/MandaMM and between other MNers. Let's not get hung up on issues of verification of identity, or tone arguments if we can possibly help it.

@Sakura at 02:57 - re-reading the post you point to (MissHM at 19:27) - sounds more like she's an academic to me. Plus, sorry, even if you've studied writing carefully, I hate that pigeonholing by gender. Did you ever try that internet tool for categorising your writing by gender? Amongst my friends both male and female it mostly achieved pretty laughable results, and certainly it categorized a lot of female geeks as writing in a stereotypically male way.

I can assure you sakura that some women do decide to become prostitutes in their 50's and older
why not have a look around first before making assumptions that also goes for assuming that the prostitiues who post on here are men !
i know you have mentioned abut the aggressive tomes in the posts but maybe that is how she posts or maybe just maybe she is utterly fed up with the lot of you and your blinkered views !!
some of you(well maybe just one) sound and seem so resentful and imho come across ever so slightly as man haters

But those jobs you mentioned are not physically invasive, cannot cause pain or humiliation (I've wiped bums in an old people's home as a summer job, worked as a waitress) i.e the worker keeps their personal integrity to a far greater degree. With prostitution, you are not just buying a service (sex) but actually a body. Her body belongs to him.
To me it's fundamentally different. I also still have my personal reservations about women who say they've "chosen" this path, because that Belle de Jour woman had a father who used to get her to interact with the prostitutes he was paying for sex. Well, even an armchair psychologist can work out the connection between her father doing that and her becoming a prostitute.

This is a fascinating thread -- albeit one that feels quite dangerous to jump into, even given that I have read every post....

I agree with the posters who say they see it difficult to view sex work as fundamentally different from other work. In my mind at least, there are plenty of jobs that are just as degrading, mostly done by women, and offer worse pay. Wiping old people's bums in a care home, for example. It might be a "necessary" job by comparison with sex work, but I wouldn't want it to be me or my daughter, any more than I'd want either of us to become sex workers.

I also don't see how the moral distinction can be drawn between selling a body for sexual services (commodification, objectification etc) and selling a body or body part for other services (singer, model, actor, labourer, cleaner etc). I know they feel different to me, too but the act itself appears to be morally equivalent.

None of this is to deny that there aren't both strong-minded independent women escorts who are happy in their jobs and impoverished, coerced, drug-using women in great misery. But I don't think these are the only categories. Probably it's easier to think of a bell(e?) curve. The argument is then one about the skew of the curve, and whether a feminist can support the continued legality of the "happy" end when the other end is so "unhappy".

Clarify: if a "person" wrote a novel about how women enjoy being raped and are asking for it or somesuch, you 'd have more than a 50% chance of being right if you thought it was a man. So its not just the aggressive tone and style of MissHM's posts, but its that the (very) aggressive tone is being used to defend prostitution, something which many feminists believe is bad for women and that some men want to perpetuate. COuple those two things together and it makes me certain that it's not a woman.

well, there's been some mad, sweeping generalizations on this thread by Miss; so why don't we all just write what the hell we want and pretend that makes it real. It wasn't just the writing style as in the choice of sentence length and structure. It was the content as well and you can tell that kind of thing.
When I think of all the emotive subjects that are discussed on mumsnet and how much opinions differ (and lets be honest there's nothing that can rile a woman more than to be told that her choices make her a bad mother: breast/FF, WOHM/SAHM etc etc) rarely have I seen thehow can I put it distain that is prevalent in Miss's posts towards other posters. There have been namechanged prostitutes on here in the past and the topics were discussed with respect. There's a nasty element to Miss's posts that makes me think its a male poster. NOt because men are nasty, before someone says that, but because rarely have I seen women spit on another woman's opinion in quite the way Miss spits on Dittany's.

meh. some of what you say makes sense sakura, but the whole 'ooh, women don't write like that' thing gets right on my nerves. i never quite got to grips with whole ecriture feminine blah either. that's not to say that there aren't broadly generic traits in writing style that have been culturally claimed as masc or fem, (and fashionable bandwagons to jump onto periodically) but to claim you can tell the sex of a person by ten lines of internet chat... you've got a 50% chance of being right or wrong, frankly.

i'm not saying misshm is a woman either lol, but i'm not claiming to know either way...

the 'what do you want your daughter to be' question is interesting though - coincidentally i was wondering the same thing earlier. i wonder if misshm or manda would like to share their mother or daughter's opinion of their choices?

SGB,
I don't think that men who use prostitutes are necessarily arseholes or abusive but I do think they have a strange view of women, and that they do regard women as commodities. They are separating the woman's body from her mind; her body is what has become the commodity and her mind (opinions, choices, preferences) is irrelevant to him. THere are men who do this with women who are not prostitutes, but that doesn't make it ok. Its the total de-humanizing of a woman in that he can't see that she is just like him, except that she's a woman; and how would he like it if someone paid him a few pounds to stick their dick in whichever orifice of his they chose. He wouldn't like it at all, I'm sure, especially if he realised that because they were paying they suddenly had the right to do it, and he couldn't say no half-way through for fear of inciting their anger or because if he did he might not be able to pay his rent.

I think that society generally views women's bodies as commodities though (again,look at the beauty industry), so he may not think he's doing anything wrong.

MissHOneyMoon's post at 19:27 has me fully convinced he's a man. Well, one reason, I'm a writer and study writing carefully. In general men and women write differently. Its a different voice. Pick up any mainstream novel, you can often tell.

If my daughter came to me and told me she wanted to be a prostitute, I would talk her out of it, not encourage it. I think you would have to be a very strange type of woman to be happy that your daughter is a prostitute. To pat her on the back and say "well done", I think you're making the most of your brains and your life.
On the other hand I think it'd be normal if you were happy that your daughter was a nurse or a doctor, a teacher or a designer.

I'll never be convinced that a woman who wants her daughter to be a prostitute is normal in the head. Those who are defending prostitution as being a "choice" that empowers women, please try to imagine why that would be. Clue: its not because I'm sexually repressed, or because I look down on prostitutes.

Well if we want to pretend its just an "industry" like any other, the whole damn industry should be closed down for being ageist. Why don't 55 year old women suddenly decided to enter this industry? Hmm, apart from the fact she's emotionally less vulnerable due to maturity and probably economically in a better situation, its because men, who dictate the terms of the industry, wouldn't pay to have sex with her when they could pay for a young 18 year old.

I think being young and that the majority of prostitutes are young is a HUGE, huge issue that a lot of proponents of prostitution are glossing over. Young people are in a more vulnerable position than other members of society. They haven't paid off their mortgage yet, they don't have a lot of life experience etc. If a 55 year old woman felt that entering prostitution was her "calling", I would probably have no qualms about that, given her life experience. But the fact that most of the women in the industry are so young is a big issue for me.

I used to know a prostitute and she was tricked and lured into the industry. Once she started, she carried on, because the money was good. But she was free to leave if she wanted to. I think most young women are lured into it or pimped into it and do not enter it out of free choice, unlike mandamumu who has never met a single prostitute who didn't enter it out of free choice, which I find to be somewhat amazing.

Dittany: your posts do come across as though you see sex as something horrifying and totally apart from all other kinds of human activity. Not everyone sees it this way. For instance, paying for an elaborate meal in a restaurant is not a bad thing but people might want to consider and wonder whether the food they are eating was produced by victims of trafficking working under threat of violence, whether the people in the kitchens washing the pots are working for pennies, sleeping 10 to a room and working under constant threat of violence... Is that really less worrying you than the thought that some people pay for sex with a non-coerced person who is happy to supply it for money because to that individual having sex is simply not a big deal?

If women are trafficked and controlled and forced to do the job, then I agree with you that they cannot be prosecuted because they are victims.

But is MissHoneyMoon also a victim? I guess you would not prosecute MissHoneyMoon, but would you want to prosecute MissHoneyMoon's punters, because this would lead to MissHoneyMoon not being able to carry on with her choice of work?

no, lol, of course the main issue (if we are talking about wider issues of gender/ society) is not my authority at work lol. but (again) i'm talking about a much smaller scale of operations.

my subordinates use of sex workers appeared to make no difference to the way they treated me (a woman) at work. it appeared to make no difference to how they treated their wives and children (those that had them), girlfriends, or, women they picked up in bars for free sex. that was kind of my point though - yes it made me feel extremely uneasy, but, on the face of it, there were no noticeable repercussions.

what made me uneasy, of course, were the invisible repercussions - you know, that bigger picture stuff.

not, interestingly, the welfare of the women themselves (again, most of whom appeared to fall into the 'happy hooker' category - largely in bigger european cities. i saw no evidence of any compunction, although do realise that would have been neatly tidied away ). no, i don't know whether the buildings were owned by a co-operative of happy hookers, or a violent landlord/ pimp lol. i say interestingly, because again, with hindsight, i may or may not think differently now.

tbh at the point of most of the transactions, i was more worried if the lads were going to show for work the next morning, and how i was going to explain losing a member of hm forces in the red light district to my boss, if they didn't. with a good dose of 'ffs, keep it in your trousers' on the side.

so, ok, clearly i fell/ fall short of certain idealist principles because i didn't, well... what, exactly? i didn't condone their behaviour - they knew my feelings on the matter (a certain sheepishness of glance as they sidled off, and a refusal to look me in the eye the next morning) but ultimately, i couldn't get the job done by refusing to work with men who use prostitutes. and getting the job done, was, well... my job.

did it bother me? well, obviously it did. i didn't see much of their wives and children, but i was always fascinated by how different they were with their families than out on the razz. ultimately it's why i left. (not use of prostitutes as such, but gender issues as a whole). various allegedly wise senior officers told me i could only change the service from the inside. what they really meant was that i couldn't even change the service from the inside, but that i was a reasonable worker when i wasn't on my high horse, so hang around and do a bit more work, love. but keep your gob shut.

attempting to unravel a single ideology of gender or even prostitution from that trivia is obviously daft. feel free to come up with a good criticism and a much more sensible idea of what i should have done in those circs though (although resigning immediately would have been momentarily satisfying, it wouldn't have a- paid the bills, or b- made much difference to the institution as a whole 'can't take a joke, shouldn't have joined' etc etc.)

dittany, it takes two to tango, both the prostitute and the client are taking part.

I can understand your argument if the prostitute has been forced to do the job, but, for example, MissHoneyMoon has not been forced to do it.

Molesworth, I disagree with you there. Take MissHoneyMoon, she is a supplier or dealer. In her case there are no pimps, brothel keepers or traffickers. She is the sole supplier providing the service of prostitution by choice. Her provision of prostitution is either a problem or it isn't.
If it is regarded as a problem then she has to be stopped from doing it via prosecution etc.
Any other action is not going to stop the activity.