Is sex working ever 'acceptable'

[neverthebride]

Hi everyone, this is my first post on this board so please be gentle (!) but I'd really appreciate some views.

I have a friend who is a sex worker. Very 'exclusive' kind of thing, earns a lot of money etc. I've known her for a long time but it's only recently that she's confided in me that that's how she earns her living.

I've known several sex workers in the past (I work in MH) and those people have been at the 'street level' and were invariably drug addicts and/or very damaged individuals who were abused in so many ways in their personal lives and as sex workers and would not have been sex workers if they felt they had other options.

My friend has apparently been doing sex work for a long time. She is highly educated, has no history of abuse in her life and seems to have made an informed choice to go into sex work as a 'business'. Her clients are big-spenders and she works in an environment where all possible safety precautions are taken. She does not do anything that she doesn't want to do and has made an enormous amount of money (which she admits she is 'addicted to').

I'm really torn on this issue which I didn't think I would be!. On one hand,I think HER experience might be positive but it's perpetuating the idea that sex and bodies are for sale and I absolutely disagree with that and know that the overwhelming experience of sex workers is just horrific.

On the other hand, I think she's an adult woman who's educated and informed and who am I (or anyone else for that matter) to say that she can't make the decision about what she does with her own body?.

I won't not be her friend because of her choices but I feel so uncomfortable with either of my thought processes. Help!

Yes that is it Buffy there is free choice and then there is free choice within a society that says women are mainly good at looking pretty and being fucked.

I have no patience with the argument that women can never have any autonomy in the patriarchy, waa waa, let's just kill ourselves then.

If you have free choice not to engage in sex work, then others have the free choice to do so. The people who have no choice (because they have been trafficed or are working under threat of violence etc) are the ones we need to help.

Do we think the majority if sex workers come from stable backgrounds, have a high level of education and would easily be able to find alternative employment? Or is the opposite true?

Further more, when talking about "free choice", consider this, doing bar work or shop work when you don't really want to means pouring drinks or stacking shelves.

Doing sex work when you don't want to, means you are having sex against your will and are actually being assaulted and raped, something which is hugely horiffic, distressing and damaging to most most people.

"14 the average age"

bollox I agree. Churning out junk stats like this doesn't do the credibility of the "abolitionist" side any favours.

I believe the vast majority of sexworkers in the UK are not trafficked and the media is feeding us a lot of moral panic. If they were I'm sure we would have found more victims and traffickers in all those raids the police have done. There's even been a recent case in Soho where a brothel was closed because the police assumed the workers were trafficked after raiding it, only for the workers to protest to a court that they weren't trafficked to get the brothel back open.

"you get that many people's objections to the purchase of sex are independent of their concerns about trafficking, don't you?"

Moral issues?

"sahisej have you heard about the stolen girls in Nigeria? "

Yes. Wasn't that because of sharia law?

I would like to see where the age 14 comes from as well.

That was the age my friend was though when she agreed to have sex with 2 blokes for a couple of joints. I imagine that sort of thing happens a lot - the girls in recent cases were first got hold of very young, younger than 14.

I suppose it depends how they measured it - what they were defining as prostitution. If it was sex in exchange for anything - for themselves or for the people controlling them - then that would widen the numbers considerably I'd have thought. They would also need to count that as prostitution for the purpose of this, rather than child abuse. As otherwise, obviously prostitution never happens with anyone under 16 (18?) as that is against the law and called something else.

Oh looking at the title of the paper in the link, the average age was 13 not 14, and the study was global in which case I have no trouble believing it at all.

I was also offered money for sex when in my teens, more than once.

As long as adult men think it is OK to approach underage girls and offer them things in return for sex, there will be girls who are prostituting themselves at a young age - whether they continue with that or not. Some girls are always going to say yes for a variety of reasons, and very rarely will they be based in what a normal person would consider free choice / informed consent.

It would be really nice if adult men didn't approach underage girls for sex, whether paid or otherwise, really.

"normal person"?

"the average age was 13 not 14, and the study was global in which case I have no trouble believing it at all."

Still don't believe it. In the UK there are thousands of sexworkers in their 30s, 40s,50s and even older still. To get an average age of 13 or 14 there would need to be half a million or so of them still in their diapers.

And the definition of prostitution could be expanded even further if we include women who will only go home with a guy who buys her dinner and a nights worth of drinks first.

"It would be really nice if adult men didn't approach underage girls for sex"

There's a law in the UK against this, even if the girl is not underage. It's called solicitation- a client can only legally contact someone for paid sex if they have advertised as providing sex.

diapers?

What an odd choice of word. You also seem to have overlooked that this was a global study and thus an average age of entering prostitution of 13 seems not unlikely.

Also interesting that rather than say HOW AWFUL to real examples of underage girls being offered cash/goods for money, that's terrible to an actual 14 yo having sex with 2 men for drugs, the response is "Oh Well there's a law against that so everything is fine".

Jesus.

cash/goods for sex, that is! Typo.

solidgoldbrass why would anyone consider it desirable that the sale of a woman's sexual autonomy to men should be normalised? Even if there are some women who fit the happy hooker trope, they are enabling punters to close their eyes to the reality of life for the woman selling sex for £30 and perpetuating the role of women as the passive sex class whose sexual gratification does not matter. If that is their choice, exercised with perfect agency, I will not support it and I will certainly not prioritise it over the women in prostitution who do not have the privilege of perfect agency.

Because there is nothing wrong with exchanging sex for money it's no more inherently wrong than dancing for money, singing for money, reading tarot cards for money, writing for money or acting for money.

I choose these examples deliberately as sex is a recreational activity, or at least closer to a branch of the entertainment industry than (eg) cleaning toilets or gutting fish for a living. People may choose to take a job that is distasteful to them for money and they should have the right to make that choice ie that of more money for a job that's harder or more demanding, or a 'cleaner' job for less money.

Or they can choose to treat as a job something that other people do for pleasure (sex or music or art).

"for the woman selling sex for £30"

You mean £300?

"diapers?"

Or nappies, if you prefer.

sahisej You mean £300?

No, Flora means £30. A lot have to sell it for less. I know this, I have looked after them before. You could also have a look on P*net and have a look at how much the women earn on average and then come back and tell us.

lol @ £300

This is also all looking at "professional" women who advertise and stuff.

Girls doing stuff for a line or an eighth or to get let off a fare (as one of my other friends was once offered) are clearly not coining it...

Thinking about it, it is clear that girls are socialised quite young (IME anyway) into the idea that men will offer them stuff in return for sexual favours.

Pretty disturbing isn't it.

I guess this explains why so many more girls and women see it as an option to make money than boys and men? Just a thought.

Nope I mean £30 although in fact in the situation I'm thinking about it was only £18 because 40% went to the pimp. When you see the figures on p net, don't forget those are the amounts the punters paid, not the amounts the women actually earned. This is part of the happy hooker myth, that the women are earning great money.

SGB on the basis of your argument, sex work should be included in careers guidance in schools, children should be sent to do it as work experience, they should be compelled to enter into it by the DSS when on benefits.

The fact that these things do not happen, show that in our society and for the majority of people there is a fundamental difference between fucking and painting.

I would genuinely like to know how far-ranging school career guidance is, these days. (My DS is too young, as yet, to be offered careers advice).
I mean, do they talk to the children about becoming medical professionals, teachers, accountants? Do they explain to them that even if they go to university most of them will end up working in retail or catering? Or a call centre?

Do they discuss unusual jobs, such as undertaker, counsellor, therapist, pet groomer, abbatoir worker?

As to the DSS forcing people to enter into any kind of work, that's wrong. There was a thread recently about a lifelong vegan being threatened with benefit sanctions if she wouldn't work in an abbatoir. The treatment of jobseekers in general is a whole other thread.

So your stance is, in fact, that work involving sex acts should be treated in exactly the same manner as all other types of work.

You see, that's just plainly silly. We agree with each other on many points SGB but you seem to have a blind spot around this particular area.

In our society, for the majority of people, sex is NOT the same as other recreational activities like painting or music. Is it was, there would be baby sex classes for middle class parents to take their children to for a head start, people would join classes at the local college to do it with groups of strangers of all ages and sexes, and work bonding activities would include Dave from accounts being asked to give Mike from HR a blow job to further inter-team cohesion.

There are also quite a lot of other jobs that people don't give their DC a head start in because they are adult activities. Kids don't get sent on work experience to pubs, nightclubs or bookies as far as I know.
And, actually, there are classes you can take to learn more about sex and to practice sex acts, should you want to. For some people it is a recreational activity that they want to learn further skills in. Wasn't there a big fuss a year or two ago about bondage classes in some village hall?

I'm always a bit about the sex lives of people who would claim it is work. But apparently that makes me a prude. Go figure.