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

oh blimey, i've missed loads.

i've got to cook the dinner but i'll be back later - re my involvement and punters lol - um, probably pushing 100? of which i've listened to the aftermath of about 35, and asked questions of far less - maybe 10? i think a lot of the use i saw was peer pressure related tbh. but undoubtedly some 'quieter' service users than i was aware of but that kept themselves to themselves. most of them weren't secretive at all lol, but that was probably a lot of bravado and circumstance tbh.

how did i feel about it? impossible to answer in isolation - as i said earlier it appeared to make no difference to my authority at work - they appeared to be able to compartmentalise women who sold from women who didn't... but the waters of the gender pool were far muddier than that.

i'll be back...

The way I see it is either prostitution is a problem that should be stopped or not. If it is a problem then anything that stops it will be good, and that will mean cutting the supply off, not just trying to reduce the demand.

If drugs are a problem, then you have to cut the supply off i.e. prosecute the dealers as well as any users. It looks like you are just targetting the users, so the potential suppliers will still be around.

It seems that you don't think that it is a very urgent problem that should be immediately stopped, the bigger problem is the men who are the users. Just like the burglars you won't be able to catch them all, so prostitution will still continue and you will be constantly chasing a moving target. Whereas if you wanted to stop it urgently, it could be killed stone dead at the source.

yes, the wider debate is. i'm interested what individual sex-workers make of that from a personal angle. an insider view, rather than our external one (assuming neither you nor i are members of the sex industry)

the troll thing is irrelevant. i found the other forums quite interesting, so not really a total waste of my time, whether misshm and manda are blokes who work for the grauniad/ pimps or bonafides. it's not like i'm taking notes for my homework .

if i wanted to interview sex-workers in rl i'd find some and check validity - way too many issues with internet forums, and i'm way too familiar with ethical protocols to make anything of an mn thread, whatever random journos might decide is okey doke. but internet forums (not this one lol, but i'm always interested to bookmark more specialist sites) have proved a valuable source of initial contact in the past for all sorts of things, not just research participants. (hopefully dd2 will be able to make her own way in the sexual relationship department, for example)

but yes. you are, of course, right.

society's issue is with the men who buy and sell women.

if misshm and manda had introduced themselves as such, i'd be asking very different questions (and maybe even doing a bit of shouting ). i can get quite worked up, on occasion. honest.

It seems to me that if people wanted it to end, it would not be that hard to do, but it would involve prosecuting the prostitutes as well as the punters. It seems that you want to only target punters. I can't see how that will stop it quickly. It seems to me that without turning the tap off, it will still continue because it will be very difficult to catch all of the potentially millions of punters.

I am not sure, I understand some of SolidGoldBrass's and MissHoneyMoon's points and I understand some of yours. I am still undecided.

Dittany: thanks for the link, will explore that further.

Mind you, OK, let's talk about the buyers. Some of them certainly are woman-hating arseholes, I don't think anyone would deny that. Of the others, it would seem (this is what I have heard from the willing sex workers I am aquainted with) that they want a variety of things - guaranteed sex rather than time spent 'on the pull' with no guarantees, the acting out of a specific fantasy etc. And for those buyers who are not into hurting others, not physically or verbally abusive, I (and some other people) really don't see the problem with paying for sexual activities in the same way that a person could choose to pay for an elaborate meal in a restaurant rather than cook at home, or pay for a counsellor to listen to hours of rambling rather than just getting a grip, or pay to have one's house cleaned rather than doing one's own housework.
For many people, sex needs to be allied with some sort of emotional intensity, fair enough if you are one of those people. But it isn;t the case for everyone. Sex is simply not that big a deal to quite a lot of people, so the constant insistence that having sex for money rather than out of 'love' is inherently wrong and harmful, seems both subjective and misguided.

dittany , do you want to make prostitution illegal?

dittany, no sorry, we're talking at cross-purposes and arguing exactly the same thing. i don't mean i'm not recognising the debate - the wider debate - just that in this (small scale mn debate/ thread) i'm trying to explore what this very small aspect of the wider whole (ie 'safe' prostitution) means to those actually engaged in it.

i'm quite happy to talk lad mags/ prostitution as a whole, but right now i'm merely curious how one (or two) individual women see their own role in the bigger picture. i'd be equally excited to talk to 'angel', or a trafficker, or any number of other individuals engaged in any area of sex-work (directly or indirectly), as well as punters (i know quite a lot of punters lol). but they aren't currently posting on mn, offering to share their opinion.

that's not denying culpability, that's not denying any other facet of society/ global sex-work/ ramifications of legal/ illegal prostitution for anyone. it's suspending judgement and allowing an individual (or two)to disclose their own reality.

whether you or i condone that reality is just an interesting point in the debate, really. (this debate, not the wider debate)

so i'm not refuting the debate (really that's what my interest feeds into of course - hence my concerns re culpability - both my own as a 'witness' if you like, as well as working girls at the 'safe' end) but just concentrating on making sense of someone else's view of it.

i'd love to know how sex-workers make sense of their role in the big picture. and that's sort of where we started? i think!

of course you are right that the actual op doesn't really ask the 'right' question - what of the men indeed? but it was the op, lol. so that's what we're talking about.

but thread-drift allowing, i'd say that chasing down users of this type of service to get their opinion is even more difficult than forming a representative pie chart of sex-workers - as misshm pointed out, the 'service-providers' are visible if you know where to look. punters not so much.

but i'm being facetious again. i know that this is a male issue. if you read my previous posts i think i make it clear - as i said, i've travelled the world watching my (male) subordinates pay for sex, and have a concern that this (as well as all the other much louder/ more visible stuff) must be in some way intrinsically bad for the female of the species (for all of the reasons you mention).

i am interested to know if 'safe' sex-workers feel that what they do is part of that commodification of women, do individuals see commodification as a problem? presumably not. i want to find out where that thought trail goes. i'm interested to know how a sex-worker sees any aspect of being a woman in british society tbh.

i find the feminist/ sex-worker debate v interesting. a long time ago a few academics did some research into army wives and feminism. it's not relevant at all, but that's also a dichotomy that fascinates me. is it possible to be a feminist and sign over your entire life to a man who will trawl you and your babies (for you will have babies ) across the world for pretty much your entire adult life, making it impossible for you to have a career even if you so desire? can you be a feminist in that situation?

it's all context. my context for this discussion was to get to know a bit more about what makes an individual from the other side of the fence tick. (other contexts are available...)

that was all really clumsy - there's no right or wrong way to engage in debate on mn. i'm just in more of a listening mood today lol (despite the million word posts... )

Dittany: Well, for one thing, not everyone wants a pony.And absolutely NO ONE is denying that some people in the sex industry are horribly abused and harmed. As to the ways to help those people and reduce the possiblity of people being harmed, not everyone thinks that prohibition of the entire industry is the answer, any more than banning the eating of shellfish would have necessarily saved the cockle pickers in Morecambe Bay.
What is being done, at present, to help women leaving the sex industry to make new lives for themselves? Just telling them to leave the industry or indeed arresting and imprisoning the pimps isn't enough: what is supposed to happen to them after that? I have heard that many of those who have been trafficked tend to get deported after the brothels they were in have been shut down, which can't exactly be the best solution. (I think this also happens to victims of trafficking who are enslaved in other industries, as well, but this probably isn't the place to start the whole debate about asylum seekers and helping them build new lives etc). I am certainly not saying that enslaved, abused sex workers should be left to get on with it, but I do think that energy expended harassing the willing ones would be better spent on initiatives to help people who are poor, stranded, or desperate to retrain for other jobs or develop small businesses or something.

Dittany: you seem to have missed the bit where MissHoney said she was involved in setting up co-operatives for women trying to get out of sex work and into a different line of work. I have also noted that she says quite clearly that choosing sex work isn't for everyone and that plenty needs to be done to address the issue of exploited abused people.
And I do actually think that what Misshoney and Manda have to say is important and helpful in that they want to help the women who aren't doing it of their own free will to get out of it - they are definitely not suggesting that victims of coercion love it really, or that they should learn to love it. They are saying that if you are going to have sex for money, you should be able to make the choice freely, refuse clients who are not acceptable to you, you should not be handing over all your earnings to someone who is exploiting and mistreating you.

WRT to the more general argument about whether women can defend freely-chosen sex work given the exploitation and cruelty present in the industry as a whole, I think a parallel can be drawn with the fashion/clothing industry, where there is (again) cruelty and exploitation, whether that's the sweatshop labour making clothes for 5p a day, the starvation and psychological abuse inflicted on models (many of whom suffer horribly, develop eating disorders and MH problems and don't get to make big money) or the associated pressure on teenage girls to starve themselves and think of nothing but consumerism. Yet the fashion industry, too, has possibilities (particularly for women) to do something enjoyable and profitable and ethical such as setting up one's own clothing line, designing clothes sourcing fairly-traded fabrics etc.

i'm not framing the debate in that way really - i'm reflecting how that notion might be used in any situation (hence use of 'generally'), including this one, without consideration of consequences/ wider picture. (and completely agree that the wider industry has more impact - don't get me started on soft-porn / glamour models taking part in military exercises for 'charity' and to rally the (male, natch)troops - just my focus here is on prostitution as offered by posters on this thread - it's a small part of a much bigger picture).

misshm - interesting re an individual's transition from large-scale protest/ action to much smaller-scale day-to-day life on the ground. my personal decision to join the military was a sort of grand gender-experiment in itself (on a personal level - many many different individual ideas of what 'feminism' means at any given time). having 'proved' (allegedly) my equality and ability, i spent the next 16 years realising that the west hadn't been won after all, and fighting much much smaller-scale gender battles than my original grand-gesture had ever anticipated. i can fully understand that someone with a grand desire to eradicate poverty could end up marshalling a riot over grain...)

at a distance, i now wonder whether my 'grand gesture' would have been very different. i'm interested that you're now looking at prioritising some other areas of your life - and curious whether in hindsight you might have made different decisions? (i'm not fishing for 'oh, i wouldn't have been a sex-worker', just curious whether you might have been tempted towards greater activism/ normalisation/ legalisation etc)