To think the use of prostitutes just isn't that big a deal?

[Hihothedairyo]

Now here me out first, I do not mean married men who use prostitutes without the knowledge/consent of their wives/partners. Those are scum, I have been cheated on in that way before so believe me when I say I do not agree with that.

However, I've seen and heard a lot of people (including friends of mine) who believe that men in general who use prostitutes are scum.

Personally, I think that, provided you are sure the person you are having sex with is not being trafficked, then you are really just two consenting adults having sex. Yes there is money exchanged, but nobody is forcing the sex worker to do this job (in this scenario, I know that DOES happen).

Should a person who's say, 30 years old and still a virgin, and now feels their too old and too inexperienced to go out and find a woman to have sex with them, not be able to use a service that a woman is willingly providing? What about someone with some form of disability that wants sex but doesn't have the confidence or whatever to get it normally?

I've got a good friend who lost his virginity to a prostitute, and has visited them a few other times also. He's in a happy relationship now and does not use them and never has while in any relationship. I don't feel that him having used them was wrong, but he is not open about having used them at all and I'm pretty sure his partner doesn't know that he ever has.

I just feel there is far too much judgement and hate towards people who are, in reality, just doing something that has been done since time began. And I see no wrong in it, I imagine I'm in the minority here though.

And the willing ‘escorts’ or sex workers are doing nothing more than perpetuating the concept that sex for money is acceptable and are enabling men to believe that paying for sex is ok. It’s not OK it is one of the most degenerated industries exploiting women. As for the willing women themselves, really, no self respect and, as explained above, no respect for other women either, but that’s a different discussion.

I think that although we can accept that there are women who do do this willingly and love what they do, I think you still have to ask how any woman has reached a point in her life where she feels that the thing she is best at is having sex with men.

you can’t tell me that any woman who prostitutes herself willingly has the same kind of self worth that most of us do.

I can sort of see wanting to work on a sex chat line, It’s just chat and meaningless, you never meet the men and are likely never going to talk to them again. I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t keep a straight face for a start, but to willingly have sex with men is a whole different matter.

And I know this is perhaps controversial, but I equally don’t agree that someone with severe disabilities should be exempt from judgement over using a prostitute. It’s unfortunate that some have such severe disabilities that they will never have a real relationship or a sexual encounter. But that shouldn’t give them the right to feel that they are entitled to have sex with a prostitute.

I read an article once about a young man whose parents took him to Spain to see such a prostitute, and his attitude was that he just wanted to feel loved. As sad as that may be, it’s an illusion.

Also, if you think about someone with severe disabilities having sex with someone who can do most of the work, and you turn the genders around and imagine that person is a woman, you have to think about what a male prostitute having sex with her, given she can’t, actually means/entails. No, it’s not the man’s fault that he has to rape a woman who can’t have sex naturally, but that is essentially what it is.

If it’s not right for a woman then neither is it right for a man.

Read “Selling Olga - stories of human trafficking”, written nearly twenty years ago but unbelievably relevant to this topic.

freddiemercury. I’d be very interested to know why you think that the women you interviewed told you 100% of their stories and were 100% truthful.

Do you think that they always did? Or that they wholly and freely chose right from the start? Did they have fulfilling careers before turning to this line of work? Have they hidden abusive childhoods? Just how in-depth did your interviews go that you are 100% confident that they are truly fulfilled and happy at work and in their personal lives?

gypsywater what's awkward is that instead of trying to debate or educate me about your opinion, you choose to dismiss me as 'just a man'.. If I were, I doubt I'd come on here to be slated for my choices on a site or majority women.. But I'm not so I wouldn't know.

user14928465 you know abseloutley fuck all about my life so don't assume. Just because iv never been involved in prostitution doesn't mean I have never struggled and that I don't understand abuse etc. I was raped in a toilet at the age of 16 by a man who I knew and had been friends with, I also had a partner who beat the shit out of me and tried to strangle me while I held my 5 month old son in my arms, a father who was addicted to heroin and a mother who never gave a shit about any of her children. So please don't assume you know my life.

I spoke to my DH about this and we share similar views
he would never want to have sex with someone who didn't want to have sex with him ( I may have a word about him about this haha) and he would see prostitution as this, Saying that he there maybe enough women who feel happy to do this to make outlawing it difficult. Its similar to porn in that way I suppose
It is a very difficult subject and not really a black and white one idea fits all.

Specifically - some sex workers actively choose their career as a valid option. I don't think they'd like to be lectured on their choice, made as grown adults.

Their 'choice' harms other women, harms women as a class. It sends a message that women are there to be commodified by men and to service men ... Not every choice made by an individual woman is automatically empowering, feminist or harmless just because it is a woman making it.

Yes, @OnlyTheTitOfTheLangBerg - which is why I concluded the post which your quote is selectively taken from with -
The sex worker industry is what we should be criticizing here, & the society which has brought it to bear in such unequal & degrading ways - not the minority of women who choose to profit from it, & certainly not the vast majority, who are exploited, demeaned, & unsafe.

• I didn't say I agreed with the specific sex worker's view which I cited. I also made it very clear that the specialist work she engages it puts her firmly in the driver's seat - her clients are not allowed to touch her. That does not mean I condone the sex industry.

The entire way mainstream society views sex, bodies, womens rights & especially the way women's bodies are commodified as objects to be commented on & appraised, or their owners shamed for non-compliance to some arbitrary patriarchally-imposed standard is repugnant.
Until that entire societal hot mess is sorted out, there is no hope that the treatment of women, within or without of the sex industry, is ever going to improve.
Which is pretty much never, but hey ho, that's a whole 'nother thread.

@freddiemercury read Rachel Moran “Paid For”. She talks about lying bare faced to journalists.

Also what about stripping? Some of the responses here would bring that into the equation?
How does that equate if we are going down this line?
Is this somehow less important because a large proportion of customers are female now days?

Of course 'celebrity' sex workers lie, everyone lies about their job. Actors don't tend to say 'I find talking to journalists incredibly boring and you know what, this movie is shite' do they? Equally a sex worker who's trying to portray her life as lovely and glamorous isn't going to say 'I've had my vagina torn three times by men who were too rough' is she? All jobs have their shit elements. The difference with sex work is that the shit elements include being infected with life threatening illnesses, having an unwanted pregnancy, damage to your reproductive organs, physical and psychological injury and death. Those dangers are there no matter how famous you are or happy you seem.

Strippers who work in a club and don't do private dances, are dancing in full view of many people - they are not alone with men and they don't have to have anything inserted into their body. It's not an ideal job but it's not the same as exchanging bodily fluids with somebody else.

Are you having a laugh? Unless someone is forcing you to prostitute yourself, you are choosing to do it, regardless of your circumstances. 'having sex with random men for money was my only option' is bullshit. I can respect the decision to do it if you choose to, but it IS a choice.

What are the other options? Give me some examples.

winesalot charlotte rose was a teacher and gave it up to be an escort. I've interviewed her on many occasions. She had a daughter and an extremely loving relationship with a man who tragically died recently. She's intelligent and beautiful and actually does have sex with disabled men and sincerely enjoys it and they find it extremely uplifting. It's certainly not a job for everyone and of course trafficking and pimping is horrendous. But that wasnt what the OP was talking about.

I know someone who was a financially successful prostitute.
Every spare penny fed her drug habit. She has lost her children (SS had to step in because she wouldn’t keep the punters away from them). She is now broken, poor and far older than her years.
I’m sure she presented the happy hooker myth to the punters even when her life was going to shit.

freddiemercury So, she got to pick and choose her clients then? Was she the person that said 'If I was good at flower arranging, I'd be a florist'? I only ask these things because you do seem to be making your point based on 'interview' knowledge and you really cannot know what is truly happening within that person.

However, I will agree that there is always going to be people who will choose this work completely willingly without having any issues or need to 'disassociate'. They also may be the ones who have a choice in which men they have sex with.

The question always remains 'how do you really know that the person you are paying to penetrate their body or to provide any sexual service to you is doing this completely of their own free choices'?

winesalot no two different escorts. I have interviewed them but I've also subsequently spent time with them socially. They are happy.

No problem with it at all.

I believe in free will and certainly not everyone who is selling sexual activity is doing it because they have no other option. What about sugar babies? What about straight up goldiggers? Are they innocents with no other choice? A lot of women choose to sell themselves in different capacities.
I also know a guy who has visited prostitutes. Just a normal busy guy with no girlfriend and high standards. The women he meets have a far better wage than I do.

Freddie So, do you believe that they are representative of the majority of prostitutes then?

And are you in the UK?

Thanks for answering?

Also what about stripping? Some of the responses here would bring that into the equation?
How does that equate if we are going down this line?

It can't come as a shock that many people who don't agree with the commodification of women's bodies are consistent across the piece? So no to prostitution, no to stripping, no to surrogacy.

Any more whataboutery anyone else wants to throw in as if it were some kind of 'gotcha'?

Winesalot yes you're right there, I do realise now that I was naive on that front. I suppose I just sort of assumed you'd be able to tell, obviously not.

I made an absolute fucking fortune. Problem was, it was all cash, and I was living a life that looked to the outside eye, very glamorous, going to all these fancy-fuck hotels (Ritz/Dorchester etc) and so you need a fancy bag and fancy shoes and your hair done and a gram of cocaine just to keep chipper around these men who you can’t really fucking stand, and you need a taxi there and back and a baby sitter and you know your mate needs to pay her traffickers on Friday and she hasn’t got the cash and so you give her half of yours and now you don’t have quite enough left to pay rent that month so the cycle starts over.

You can’t prostitute to buy a house because you can’t account for where the money is coming from. Conveyancers are on the look out for signs of money laundering so a relatively young woman with a giant cash deposit and no paper trail for it is going to get reported to the police.
Even those who make tons of money are stuck in an unstable life.
Besides, we all get old, and youth is the thing that punters prize the most, so once you are of a certain age you are either a niche attraction and expected to do niche things (often very risky) or you start making money out of introducing younger women and it becomes a pyramid scheme of exploitation.

Some of the men in the racket are also vulnerable, doormen/barmen/cleaners etc are all just as likely trafficked as the women, and equally likely to be introduced to a drug habit that gets them into unpayable debts to the higher ups.

It’s worse for the women, but it’s not rosy for the men at the bottom either. Like I said before, it’s not an ‘industry’, it’s organised crime.

winesalot I am indeed in the UK.
And not representative as the majority worldwide ...no. But there are certainly a significant amount of women who are in that camp. And Charlotte Rose in particular was very indignant recently as she was cut from a documentary about prostitution.. she feels it was because she was too positive about her career choice. I've also interviewed a former street worker who would sell her body for 6 so she could buy crack. It was heartbreaking and she is now clean and helps other street workers. There are a whole range of workers within the sex industry and I think it's important to recognise that and help those that desperately need it and not try to shame women for their career choices if they enjoy it and claim they have no self worth etc... it's ignorant

Strippers who work in a club and don't do private dances, are dancing in full view of many people - they are not alone with men and they don't have to have anything inserted into their body.

This is how it starts though. Once you are in that world it becomes your new normal. The other girls, who you like and respect, all make more than you because they do private dances and so the club managers direct customers to them and not you. Eventually you give a private dance a go because rent is due tomorrow and you are the only girl on shift that has made less than xx this week. It’s not that bad so you do another one. The management start sending regular, big spending customers your way but these are the men that expect you to do ‘extras’ - maybe one or two of them you might have slept with for free in the real world, if you were drunk enough, lonely enough...

It chips away at you. You take a job as a dancer, you end up with a cock in your hand and a fistful if tenners in your handbag.

Peak earning years are 18-22 (younger if you have fake ID), not exactly our wisest years!