Legalise prostitution to counter feminism (yes really)

[grimbletart]

www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/11785628/Prostitution-Legalise-sex-work-for-modern-men-says-think-tank.html

Absolutely no comment necessary for this

Oh Catherine Hakim. She's a man-pleaser if ever there was one!

She has truly awful and damaging opinions for women.

“All the available evidence points in the direction of prostitution and erotic entertainments having no noxious psychological or social effects, and they may even help to reduce sexual crime rates.”

Jesus Christ - does she actually believe this? Has she read any survivor accounts or is she basing it all on Belle du Jour (or whatever that blog/book/TV Programme was) - or more horribly, does she mean on the people consuming and isn't thinking about the women being used at all?

It's their sexual appetites dontcha know.

Yep they can't help themselves. That's why they commit sexual crimes.

Nowt to do with hatred, sense of entitlement and the culture being upheld by society.

she argues: “Male sexual desire is manifested at least twice as often as female desire, and men would like to have sex twice as often as women.

Is it me, or does that comment make no sense at all?

OMFG

So she says that men are "no longer getting their sexual needs met at home" due to women becoming more empowered - she means that women no longer feel that they have to lie back and think of england? Or is she referring to the criminalisation of rape within marriage?

So she connects women getting more independence with not "giving" their men more sex I was going to write "she connects women getting more independence with not wanting sex as frequently as they used to" but this is clearly cobblers isn't it as increasing independence doesn't have anything to do with your sex drive. So she can only be referring to women no longer having / having to have sex that they don't want.

Then she says that if men can pay for sex they won't commit sexual assaults. Is she saying that all men who pay for sex are rapists? That some of them are? Clearly consensual sex and sexual assault are not the same thing at all, if a man wants to sexually assault people then he wants to sexually assault them, consensual anything isn't going to work for him. So is she saying that terribly old, grotesque idea that society needs to provide prostitutes to be raped and assaulted so that they don't do it to "decent" women?

I mean WTF at the whole thing is she nuts? She genuinely believes that women are pretty much devoid of sexuality and men are all rutting, raping beasts.

Bleurgh.

Having just finished reading the full peer reviewed report she uses the discredited Lilith/Eden report from Eaves as one of her arguments that feminist reasoning has failed. She quotes Magnanti (Belle de Jour) only once but plenty of work from various creditable research. Hakim doesn't claim Causal effect but says the evidence seems to support it.

The stripping blog has been saying the same thing for last 3 years and sorry but given everything in the full report (which I got mailed to me by a friend) the Prickademics (as Bindel would call them) will be quoting this work a lot over the next few months, if not years. And people who are sitting on the fence in terms of belief will be backing this work.

Someone put this link to guardian piece about why men use prostitutes up on the AI & prostitution thread. Some of them - there were only 12 interviewees though - did indeed seem to think that if they didn't they would rape instead. Coupled with total lack of awareness that the woman exists as an independent entity with feelings at all. And normally they're just walking around the streets. Scary.

This article has gone right back to the idea that men are just animals with sexual needs which they have no control over hasn't it. As usual how flattering to men. And how odd that not all men suffer from it then.

Then to add insult to injury - men have this problem so women have to lie back and put up with it. Odd, for this mentality, that when women have problems they have to deal with them - eg they have children, so they can look after them or get pilloried for not doing so; they get pregnant, so they have to be on the pill, it's their fault if it happens. But for men, no, they have this problem (they say) and rather than eg find some kind of anti-libido pill for them, more women need to agree to be fucked for money.

And they never ever even notice their own inconsistencies.

The link is [http://www.iea.org.uk/publications/research/supply-and-desire-sexuality-and-the-sex-industry-in-the-21st-century here]]

I don't think you can just write this off. Hakim is a creditable researcher no matter what people may think of her and the average person if they read this will take it at face value. Hakim has enough resources and citations that ignoring what she writes will only happen if your ideology is set in stone and you can't view anything objectively. I have been talking with the strip blog for over a while now and really this does not surprise me now given the things I have discussed.

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Sorry missed a [

Just read the opening bit. I think her description of countries that do not follow the Swedish model when it comes to prostitution as "more sex positive" is extremely telling.

Will read on.

The defecit stuff is weird as well. It doesn't seem to cross her mind that men could have a wank, or go without. Plenty do. She talks as if sex is an imperative like eating or drinking, that men "need" sex and therefore they must have it.

Has she been talking to amnesty I wonder!

Some of the things referenced seem very old, 1996 was 20 years ago! With things to do with sex it's changing very fast isn't it.

Her work seems to be an amalgam of a lot of others research.

I am sure some men go without I think in the paper the she points out the number and guessing that a lot of men are not honest in front of us. As to the wank are you encouraging the use of internet porn to stimulate this?

God this is horrible reading. She's trying to sound all reasonable and slip in some really atrocious statements in the hope no-one will notice

eg this one

"Men's ambivalence towards women working in the sexual entertainments industry may be because they exploit men's "weakness" so effectively"

She does not support that horrendous statement in any way at all and it's really fucking strong. She says that women (and girls?) in this industry are the ones who are exploitative, that they are exploiting the men (this is presented as a statement of fact) and that this is a valid and reasonable explanation for the fact that the men who pay them are "ambivalent" towards them aka they don't give a shit about them, who they are, whether they are happy, whether they are coerced etc is neither here nor there.

Now I would say (again unsupported) that men's ambivalence towards people who in the sex industry is because they are entitled arseholes who don't see the bodies of the people they are purchasing as attached to real actual people. They feel the same way as I do towards a prawn that I eat, for example. They just don't matter. That's a far more likely explanation than the men know they are being exploited. And she's just popped that "fact" in there, that the men, women, boys and girls in the global sex industry are exploitative, they are exploiting poor men who are slaves to their sex drives and apparently incapable of having a wank.

And on I read...

sausage wtf both men and women are capable of wanking without porn

She reckons that the large numbers of migrants, both legal and illegal, working in the sex trade around the world, is because they feel more comfortable engaging in this transgressive occupation away from home, much as people behave in a more spontaneous way when they go on holiday.

She (earlier on in the paper) stated IIRC that trafficking was not as common as people think it is.

The Telegraph does actually give both sides an airing.

I'm in favour of decriminalisation as I think it will make sex work safer for sex workers - if they don't have to worry about being prosecuted themselves they will feel more able to come forward when they are being robbed/assauted/exploited. But Catherine H is talking bullshit.

\Does anyone know what this means?

"Feminists, NGOs and pressure groups portray women who work in the
sex industry and other erotic entertainments as the victims of male violence,
trafficking or poverty who had no alternatives to selling commercial services.
Economic theory still underpins this assumption, through a focus on levels
of inequality in a country as a driving factor for labour supply (Della Giusta,
Di Tommaso and Strom 2009). Similarly, Edlund and Korn (2002) rely on
the assumption of a sharp distinction between sexual and marriage markets,
which no longer applies in the 21st century"

She goes on to say that trafficking is incredibly rare and pretty much everyone working for sex is pretty happy and doing it out of genuine choice. Then she quotes this thing which MRAs always quote:

"Campaigns to eliminate sex trafficking typically identify no more than five victims – at disproportionate public expense (Magnanti 2012: 156)."

But we've had tens (scores?) of men imprisoned in the UK in the last couple of years alone, for trafficking girls, and the numbers of victims went into the hundreds. We have ongoing enquiries about further trafficking involving people in the upper echelons of society.

People who quote this over and over.... Do they never read the newspapers? And I mean it's been all over the headlines for months, hardly hidden away on page 34. It's a national scandal, and they haven't noticed?

"As economists recognise (Levitt and Dubner 2009: 54-55), the puzzle is
not why intelligent and attractive women become prostitutes, but rather
why more women are not tempted into this lucrative occupation."

...........

Not sure what to say to that one!