The greens and prostitutes

[IceBeing]

Be gentle as I am new to thinking about this.

I found the Natalie Bennett's comments on decriminalising prostitution pretty persuasive - what am I missing?

She basically said that sex workers would like this policy (having contributed to it) and that research from other countries indicated it was the way forward.

Buffy you asked about the greens on asylum and immigration. I don't quite know what you mean by 'are they going to sort that out'. It is another complicated issue because they recognise the huge impact colonialism had on creating the global inequality we have today and suggest - daringly - that we ought to take some respnsibility for that. They further recognise that the migration problem we have now is nothing compared to what will happen when the environmental problems start to hit, and that that is also a first-world creation, and therefore we ought to take some responsibility for that too. The result is that they suggest we ought to be more open to immigration.

Ultimately the only way to stop immigration is to help make people's home countries more attractive places to live for them. The greens are aware of that: at any rate in Lucas & Woodin's book 'Green Alternatives to Globalisation' they talk about it. We are well out of the time of easy solutions. I acknowledge all the problems of colonialism too, but also that we can't have all the world living in Europe.

ps They really don't like trafficking either. policy.greenparty.org.uk/mg.html

Yes but doing that without adding stigma to the workers... Look back 20 years to how men buying smithy vids were see compared to port viewers today.

smutty not whsmithy !

and port not port.

I don't think my clients are abusers. I have met some jerks, to be sure, but the majority of the men I see seem perfectly normal. I feel that many of them are nice people. This doesn't mean that all punters are nice guys - only that the ones I see seem to be. While some of you may think that any man who purchases sex from another person is automatically an abuser, much in the same way any adult who has sex with someone under age, I don't think it's necessarily wrong to purchase sex and I do think that I have the capacity to consent.

That I can choose to see only the good clients is down to two reasons that I can think of. First, I market myself to appeal to the nice gentlemen. There's a reason they choose me over the £35 parlour and the £60 attractive young Eastern European so-called independent and it's not that I'm such a stunner. The men I see often express to me that they want nothing to do with women who aren't happy to be doing it. As deluded as you may see it to be, they really want to have sex with a horny woman who loves her job. (Such women exist although in my opinion very few women are motivated primarily by a love for sex with strangers with the money being a bonus. I'm guessing most of the women in my category don't mind sex with strangers and sometimes find it enjoyable as a bonus. I have only anecdata for that.) I am privileged enough to have the education and eloquence to market myself to this sort of clientele and I have access to the Internet, computers, etc so that I can set myself up in this manner. A woman who works on the street as and when she has an immediate pressing need for cash does not have this privilege. A woman who has to work in a brothel because she can't sit back in her privately leased flat and surf the 'Net until a good client calls does not have that privilege.

Second, I screen very stringently. I will only see men who sound as if they are happy people. I will ignore any communications in text speak, that call me "babe" or "hun" or that ask silly questions (my advertising contains everything they need to know. If they obviously aren't reading that, they're not the client for me.) Even though there are days I may make literally NO money, I never waver in my screening. If I don't like the sound of someone, I won't see them.

Again, my privilege allows me to do this. I am in the position of having money in the bank, plenty of access to credit, and a stable working situation so I can look forward to tomorrow being better. I can also travel to other cities where there is better money because I am able to book a hotel online with my credit card, etc.

I would watch a smithy video.... the bare, sweaty chest, the leather apron, the muscular arm swinging the hammer and tongs... phew!

Look back 20 years to how men buying smithy vids were see compared to port viewers today

Firstly I'm quoting you in full as that is such a glorious collection of typos.

Secondly is what you are referring to a good thing or a bad thing? Is it good there is more openness about sex or bad that porn is so legitimised? For me it's the latter.

I agree with Buffy's comment re not reducing the stigma for buyers. I'm struggling however to think of any other human interaction whether commercial or personal where there can be the sort of disparity between how the parties can be viewed without leading to the conclusion that it is wrong, in all circumstances.

OK, some thoughts along the more practical lines on how to help vulnerable prostitutes:

At the conference there was talk about improving the safety and health of these women. Police representatives talked about improving communications with them. Less victim blaming and more proaction on going after violent attackers being key. Ugly Mugs tries to help facilitate communication between prostitutes and police, including helping make anonymous reports when the victims simply can't bare the thought of being outed on record or in the media. (Just today I read a warning on a girl's forum about an attacker in Chester. The victim - an independent - will not go to the police as she was told that she would have to press charges, making a public record of her occupation and perhaps inviting press attention. She won't do that.) Still, there have been improvements in some regions on convictions, especially since police have gotten on board with not victim blaming.

Also brought up was the issues of health when the police are NOT on the side of the victims. In Scotland, brothels are raided and condoms are used as evidence. So, there is apparently a perceived pressure to not have condoms on the premises. (This was reported by a Scottish outreach worker.) Obviously, if brothels are illegal and they are to be shut down and the prosecutor needs evidence, then this will happen.

I would say that most pro-decriminisation activists feel that the problem lies in shame and stigma and if women were offered safer, perfectly legal alternatives to working they would benefit greatly.

I am of the opinion that much of my pay is risk pay and that prostitution would pay very little in a utopian society in which nobody felt shame around sex, but that's all theoretical.

That risk is exactly what most people would like to see gone though...

re trafficking and Greens: I'd feel much better if trafficking policies were as highlighted as the prostitution ones. I'm they need to be put first or trafficking will increase.

bloody phone! Imo not I'm

NotwhatI - "I wonder if the debate is full of happy hookers because those who are unhappy don't want people to know we have done it."

I think that's a very interesting comment. The only ex prostitute I've talked to in RL (another mum in the park) was ashamed of what she'd done. And yet, she'd been groomed (13 year old from trouble background, pimp persuaded her to try smoking "brown" - which she, naively, thought was just a stronger form of skunk, but which turned out to be heroin), and I think it didn't occur to her to say "I was abused, this is not something to be ashamed of - but the men who did it, they should be ashamed, and the fact that they're not makes them the scum of the earth."

Kim - thanks for coming on the thread and being so honest about how you view the issue.

I think the "there will always be some men who use prostitutes" argument against the Nordic model is a complete red-herring. There are lots of things which some people will always do - theft for example. That doesn't mean we shouldn't make it illegal (to turn a blind eye would be to construct a society where the only defence to being burgled/mugged would be a kind of race to the bottom escalation of physical measures like carrying a gun or fortifying your house like a castle - I lived in inner city Leeds for a long time, and had metal grills on my doors: it's not a nice way to live). Nor does it mean we shouldn't address the social drivers - burglary rates increase along with poverty, inequality and addiction. Legalisation/criminalisation sends messages to would-be users, and just because a minority are untouched doesn't mean they aren't worth doing. Decriminalisation in Germany has led to an increase in the number of men using prositutes and an increase in trafficking.

I wasn't using it just against the nordic model-as I said I don't think the answer lies in either model. I agree that making it legal will see higher reported use as stigma decreases but stigma of buying bodies is a correct stigma in my opinion.

Kim perhaps legislation would have to include decriminalising brothels? This would deal with the problem of condoms being used as evidence, although dealing with pimps would be difficult... I agree that potentially criminalising women who share a flat for the sake of safety is dreadful, and that if one woman pays money to the other it might look like she's a pimp and so she's at risk of being criminalised. Though has this ever been prosecuted? My OH is a police officer and it seems to me that police often pursue crimes at their own discretion - e.g. no one in his station ever arrests people for begging or for smoking cannabis, since there's a silent agreement that those crimes are not worth police time and are actually really punitive, particularly against homeless people. I don't want to make it seem like the police are always thoughtful and empathetic (they're not!), but I wonder whether they would actually pursue two women who were sharing a flat and were obviously not doing anything exploitative? Prepared to be contradicted on this!

Also I hope you don't mind if I ask a personal question - are you ever afraid of your clients? I'm scared of strange men by default, and I'm always a bit nervous when a delivery man or plumber or whatever is in the house and I'm by myself. I think I'd be terrified to be in an enclosed space with a man I met over the internet, particularly if I knew he was the sort of man who likes buying sex. I take your point about your clients being very reasonable on the whole, but I can't help but be suspicious of men who don't care about the sexual desires and pleasure of their partner. Because that's the point of it, right? They don't mind if the woman they're having sex with doesn't actually want them. I really can't imagine wanting to have sex with a man who I knew didn't desire me, it would be such a turn off I don't think I could go through with it. I feel like sex ought to be about mutual desire and trust, since it's such an intimate act... am I an old-fashioned prude for feeling that way??

And thanks again for engaging on this issue, it's really helpful and interesting to hear from you. So often these sorts of debates descend into cries of "whorephobe", so it's wonderful to be able to have a thoughtful and respectful discussion.

And yes Lucio, I agree that this "oh well men will always want to buy sex so it's impossible to stop them etc." is a silly argument.

If 9% of men in the UK buy sex, that means that 91% of men don't - if they're capable of it, surely all men are capable of it? Even in countries where prostitution is legal like Holland, only 22% of men buy sex - 78% choose not to. Very many men clearly have no desire to buy sex, the task is to persuade their peers not to buy it either.

Also, if a certain proportion of men were driven by this insatiable biological drive to buy sex, we'd expect the statistics to be consistent across countries in which prostitution is legal. This isn't true - the variation between Thailand (75%) and Switzerland (19%) is huge. Clearly men are influenced by cultural forces, and cultural forces can be changed.

I don't think women sharing flats are really gone after. Few parlours are, either. The Soho raids were about wanting to clean up the area for property developers. Otherwise, nobody pays these things any mind.

The primary reason I don't share a flat is it increases footfall and noise and so the potential of neighbours complaining. That was a problem when I did share. I do think that women who share may be less likely to report crimes to the police if they think the police will be interested in the setup.

I have been nervous around a very few clients. I've not been in a situation where I was actually afraid. There is a little bit of anxiety when I'm letting in a new client for the first time: watching at the spy hole and wondering who will be getting off the lift. Is the booking going to go alright? That sort of thing. Only very rarely have I not felt assured that they were going to be alright once they had come in.

I don't know whether your clients are abusers, Kim, but it's certainly the case that many many abusers seem like perfectly nice people. So saying that they seem nice or normal does not mean that they are not abusers.

Hi IceBeing,

I found your question below interesting so i thought id reply,

"How DO we go about achieving a society in which it is inconceivable to pay for sex?"

We would need a sexless population that saw sex as distasteful, that saw no value for or even had contempt for material worth and a population that was lacking of any level of competitiveness.

Like it or not human beings are a product of evolution and as a result we have natural drives and imperatives as well as a whole host of chemicals that release into our system when certain events stimulate our bodies or minds.

Submissive meek behaviors and dominating, aggressive behaviors are also part of how we communicate our feelings on many subjects and interact in social groups.

They are also the ways we react to dangers, crisis and negotiations of all kinds both positive and negative so adjusting them will have a lot of unexpected consequences and not all of them good.

We may very well find that forcing boys to suppress their aggression means it will bottle up and be far more harmful when it does find a release or that girls become less cautious in dangerous situations.

Social engineering on the scale you are talking about is fraught with dangers that evolution by its very nature selected against but to try and change some of the most integrated human emotions and instincts over a immensely shorter time scale than evolution did it let alone in a single generation has terrifying potential to do harm.

I would never vote for the Green Party for this reason.

They should listen to exited women like Rachel Moran and Rebecca Mott more and pimps and brothel owners less.

Mary you urgently need to gain more knowledge of both anthropology and history. Human behaviour is hugely variable. Yes there are some constants - there will always be some aggression, some competitiveness and so on - but you would be startled to discover how different societies can be. If we were only products of evolution and socialisation, then we would see consistent behaviour across all human societies - we don't.

Also see my point from earlier - the percentage of men who buy sex varies massively between different populations. Prostitution is subject to cultural forces and cultural forces can be changed.

This biological determinism you expound lies at the heart of misogynist behaviour - men are like this and women are like this, and never the twain shall meet. No! Challenging these assumptions is the whole basis of the feminist project!

And aside from all of this - sex without payment is better sex!!!! Sex within prostitution cannot be truly loving, intimate and mutually pleasurable because one party is not as willing as the other. In a society in which all people really valued sexual intimacy prostitution would not exist. Your comment about abolitionists seeing "sex as distasteful" makes no sense.

typo - should read "if we were only products of evolution and not subject to socialisation"

No it is not it is what happens when you screw around with what is THE most fundamental part of humanity via short sighted social engineering experiments.

You really should look past your bias and at the fact that evolution selected for incredibly high sexual drives especially among men and that they differ considerably from ours.

Study after study shows that men's sex drives are not only stronger than women's, but much more straightforward and primal.

1. Men think more about sex.

A LOT MORE ALL THROUGH THEIR LIVES.

1. Men seek sex more avidly.

A LOT MORE ALL THROUGH THEIR LIVES.

1. Women's sexual turn-ons are more complicated than men's.

What turns women on? Not even women always seem to know TESTIFY!!!!!

1. Women's sex drives are more influenced by social and cultural factors.
2. Women take a less direct route to sexual satisfaction.
3. Women experience orgasms differently than men TESTIFY!!!!
4. Women's libidos seem to be less responsive to drugs.

So they are all relevant but lets deal with number 4 because its here that as women we have a huge problem in our understanding of men.

1. Women's sex drives are more influenced by social and cultural factors.

We think men have sex drives similar to ours but theirs is WAY more primal and is not effected much at all by social and cultural factors.

Men have every incentive to have sex to pass along their genetic material.

By contrast, women may be hard-wired to choose their partners carefully, because they are the ones who can get pregnant and wind up taking care of the baby. They are likely to be more attuned to relationship quality because they want a partner who will stay around to help take care of the child. They're also more likely to choose a man with resources because of his greater ability to support a child.

So while men want a woman to have sex with because of a instinctual drive for sex, we have a instinctual drive to look for men with certain characteristics that would benefit supporting a child etc.

Under the circumstances it comes as no surprise that it is us that have given sex a VALUE and men who have always striven in what ever way was required at the time to become valuable enough to get sex.

So while our sex drives can be relatively easy to influence by social and cultural factors, men's sex drives simply cannot and it is that fundamental fact that we need to accept and find a way to deal with.

So VALUE and my 3 points.

1. For a society to see paying for sex as inconceivable by definition that society would have to put NO VALUE on sex and men do not value what is distasteful or repellent to them (meaning mind control via drugs or the like).

1. Men compete to become more desirable mates to women so a society that put no value on sex would be lacking the level of competitiveness we have now especially among men.

1. Material worth seen by women as being useful in a mate would now be useless in regards to motorization due to points 1 and 2.

Hell just look at Japan and other modern countries where the marriage rates are plummeting as are birth rates while single mothers and immature adult men are becoming more common.

Men can now either get sex without having to take on the responsibilities they once had to take on in order to get it like marriage, job etc.

Or they see marriage as a way of losing their family, half of everything along with paying out for alimony and child support for the rest of their lives for children they hardly ever see.

I am most certainly not a traditionalist and in no way do i think we should even try to go backwards (even though its impossible anyway) but unless we base policies that accept, understand and account for both our and mens sexualities and the differences they will not and cannot work.