Economist article - 'The Sex Business'

[Sevillemarmalade]

Hi, I'm a long-term lurker rather than a poster, but I love reading the FWR threads. They keep me sane. I wanted to know if anyone had read the above article? I've just finished and feel - well, upset and uncomfortable more or less sums it up.
I know that The Economist takes a reductionist view of everything - that's it's raison d'être - but a graph showing how much female prostitutes are worth according to their physical characteristics I thought was taking it too far. It also referred to 'frustrated married men' requiring the services of prostitutes less these days because of sites like Tinder offering h

That is a really excellent point Ezinma.

Service my arse.

As a former underage prostitute myself, I cannot abide people who want to claim that sex work is somehow "empowering."

Why? Because when I was a 17 year old prostitute, I was also taughttaught!to spout the "this is my choice and I am defying society!" line. I thought I was taking ownership of my sexuality. I thought I was saying a huge "fuck you" to the man.

It took years for the programming to fall out of my head. Years to realize what I'd actually been used for, and who had benefited from that. Years to get to know a lot of other prostitutes and strippers and such who had serious psychological problems because of what they were doing--and many of them still claimed to "love" their work.

Many of us, whether we are sex workers or not, decide to love what we do, even if it was not what we would first have wanted. Many women have chosen to love their husbands in arranged marriages. To love the husband chosen for you, or the one profession that is open to you in desperate times, can make things easier on a day to day basis. It is in us to love even captors and enslavers--Stockholm Syndrome is very real and applies to many women's relationships with pimps and madams.

But many of the sex workers I know who "love" what they're doing are also downing Xanax like there is no tomorrow, or have made special rules that their boyfriends can no longer touch certain parts of their bodies that now feel dirty and bad because of the way clients have touched them, or find themselves on inexplicable, frequent crying jags or having PTSD flashbacks. Then they go right back to telling people how everything is fine.

Women are trained to say everything is fine and that they are doing just fine, because when women say "I am not fine! I am vulnerable!", especially from socially vulnerable positions, men's reaction is to mock or rape them. It's like a wounded animal trying desperately to act normal so that the rest of the pack won't tear it apart or abandon it.

AFG - thank you for sharing your experiences.

AFG thank you so much for explaining your experience so well. I read your blog, too, that you linked to on the other thread and found it very interesting.

Another thanks to AFG.

I used to work with someone who volunteered with prostituted and recently exited women and she had some absolute horror stories. How may other 'careers' involve the 'contractor' finding herself in a situation where she believes she is about to be murdered at least once a fortnight?

I don't personally, or at least knowingly, know anyone who has worked as a prostitute but I have had friends who've worked as lap-dancers. One did it because she had no options. She was employed in the most-exclusive club of its type and hated every second. She got through it because she is a feminist and it fuelled her feminist convictions. Three others had options but bought into the 'sex work is exciting/rebellious/empowering/lucrative' stuff. Two dropped out pretty quickly after being disabused of these notions and the other got turned onto cocaine by her fellow dancers because that was the only way they could all make it through a shift without having their soul destroyed.

We have to stop selling this whole 'empowerment' and 'agency' thing. Why is it only applied to those 'careers' that reduce women to body-parts?

Women are trained to say everything is fine and that they are doing just fine, because when women say "I am not fine! I am vulnerable!", especially from socially vulnerable positions, men's reaction is to mock or rape them. It's like a wounded animal trying desperately to act normal so that the rest of the pack won't tear it apart or abandon it.
YY, AFG

According to this gossip site the "empowered pornstar" Sasha Grey has said that she was forced into doing porn by her abusive boyfriend. And no one, who actually knows something about the industry, is suprised.

Another thank you to AFG for that brilliant post.

Letter drafted to the magazine. I daresay it won't be published but I feel better for having written it. Thank you to everyone for contributing to this thread.