Corbyn - "I'm in favour of decriminalising the sex industry"

[IndominusRex]

www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/mar/04/jeremy-corbyn-decriminalise-sex-industry-prostitution?CMP=share_btn_tw

Not a huge shock but still troubling to see him say it.

Well by the same logic why should women who sell sex at all get off with it? Why not just advocate for full criminalisation?

I am in favour of full criminalisation.

SpeakNoWords, that didn't answer my question.

The "prostitution is just another job" canard has been addressed on this thread and on many similar threads.

It isn't.

If we were to go the criminalisation route I would want it across the board. Drug dealers often have bad childhoods, limited choices in life, pressured into selling by local gangs they are still arrested if caught.

Is there any other job where it's legal for someone to do their job as long as they are all alone with noone else present except their client, but if they have any colleagues with them they are all automatically committing a crime?

Name another 'job' which requires the level of exposure to disease with so little protection that prostitution requires? Anyone else dealing with body fluids, or close to clients faces wears gloves, googles, and masks. I doubt a prostitute requiring that would get much work (outside of very specialised circumstances).

Prostitution is not a job.

goggles, obviously

Well you wouldn't. I don't think it's up to you to decide what is or is not misogynistic. But thanks for the input. We are definitely missing men's opinions on this subject.

Damn right. Sit back ladies...we have a man here to explain why he doesn't find the commercialisation of women's bodies troubling, so we probably shouldn't either. Thank goodness! I wouldn't have known what to think about it otherwise.

/ sarcasm

"The Nurses Union"?

okkkk.

And please, just lol at the TUC. And if you don't understand why, I suggest you go back and do some reading. Same for Amnesty and the Greens.

And no, you don't get to tell women what counts as misogyny and what doesn't.

Hello!
I’m a current sex worker and though I usually enjoy reading mumsnet rather than contributing, I feel I have to say something here before I implode in exasperated fury.

I've just posted this exact post on a similar thread elsewhere, and am quite frankly sick of repeating myself so forgive me if I come across as a bit aggressive. I also suspect I'm less formally educated than many of you so my post might read as being a bit blunt...
I also appreciate that my situation does not reflect that of all sex workers, but I wanted to share my experience and view to at least give a little more balance to the debate aside from the common narrative about prostitution.

There’s so much insulting, belittling, uninformed drivel in this thread already that I’m not entirely sure where to start, so I’m going to number what I want to say (for my own sake):

1.) I choose to sell sexual services. Please note, I do not sell my body (or any other part of myself). My body is still mine and, at the end of my working day, I merrily take it home with me to curl up in bed with my partner.
My body is not being ‘used’ by anyone but me. I repeat – I sell sexual services, not my body.
This distinction is extremely important and really needs to be hammered home to those outside of the sex industry.
Ideas about women ‘selling their bodies’ is exactly the kind of negative, socially ingrained, language used around sex work that lands sex workers with clients who feel like they own us in our entirety for their paid time, and that just isn’t the case.
We sell a physical and intimate service, not our bodies.

2.) I am not a drug user, I do not drink alcohol (been tee-total for years) and resent the insinuation that to be a sex worker involves some kind of substance abuse.

I enjoy sex immensely, I enjoy the money I earn, and I enjoy the freedom to set my own working hours or take holidays whenever I please.
I resent the idea that my chosen form of work could be taken from me (along with my autonomy over what I choose to do with my own body in the privacy of my own home) by a collection of uninformed, middle-class, moral crusaders who haven’t even bothered to listen to what the men and women working in this industry want or need, and are so far removed from the situation that they don’t even care what we feel about it anyway (in fact, our feelings seem to be brushed aside as an inconvenience).

These people, for their own ideological reasons, would see my safety reduced, my income removed and my autonomy squashed, and for what? So they can sleep well at night under the delusion that they’re being a good ‘feminist’?

3.) Not all clients are misogynistic, sleazy or harbouring a sense of entitlement. In fact, I’d go as far as saying I meet more men with sexual entitlement in my private life than I do in my working life.
Clients are as varied as any other random collection of men, few of them have much in common with each other, and their reasons for meeting with me are even more varied still.

Disabled clients, lonely single clients, experimental female clients, couples, ‘lads’ looking for no-strings fun, elderly widowers, carers of severely disabled spouses… the list is endless.
Often-times, the sex isn’t even the focus of a booking – the intimacy and closeness to another person is. My job is to make my client feel as amazing as possible, to build their self-esteem, distract them from their problems for an hour or two, to help them feel desired and attractive or simply have a laugh and some fun. It really isn’t as simple as a quick shag (though it can be that too sometimes!) and this really isn’t something you can understand unless you’ve visited an independent sex worker or worked as one yourself.
I hope me telling you now can help with that though…

4.) The Nordic model makes me very, very frightened. However, would it stop me from working in this industry? No, it would not.

Would the Nordic model make my job less safe?
Yes, of course it bloody would! And it takes a great deal of mental gymnastics (or deeply imbedded ideology against sex work) to come to any other conclusion.
Criminalising the clients would eliminate all the lovely, sweet men who come to visit me. None of them would continue to see me if it became illegal to do so.
However, do you really think criminalising the purchase of sex will stop someone from raping me? Robbing me? Assaulting me? Murdering me?
No, it wouldn’t. The men who could potentially do me harm would already be breaking the law by raping/robbing/assaulting/murdering me under our current laws around sex work, so why would an extra law stop them?
Criminalising the clients only removes the good, law-abiding and safe clients, leaving independent sex workers like me with the unlawful remainder.

Are you really willing to put my life at risk for your own moralistic ideology? Or take away my income? Or my right to decide what I do with my own body, behind closed doors and with both parties consenting?

5.) Trafficking is a red herring. We’ve been down this road several times already over the years and the fishing industry still beats the sex industry for the numbers of people trafficked into it.

6.) If sex work isn’t an industry, can I stop paying tax on my earnings please?

7.) What are my suggestions as a sex worker?
Full decriminalisation. I currently work alone in my own flat but would be significantly safer if I could legally work with another lady on the premises or with my own hired security.

I’d also like to see a huge change in the way we discuss sex work/sex workers. If people stop treating us as though we are inherent victims then perhaps we might stop becoming actual victims.

Brazenhussy0 I have read your post. Nothing in it makes me change my mind that prostitution is wrong and that society should not be facilitating it.

Interesting post brazen. You are right that I speak from a point of no experience and my views are academic.

I guess where I struggle is with the fact that there must be so many women in the positions you describe of your clients - but they either just get on with their lives or don't have the means to pay for intimacy or it is not a service worth providing.

I mean, taking sex out of it, if your body is not the issue, you seem to be talking about people with emotional needs not being met. So why are clients mostly men and those providing the service mostly women?

I am not suggesting evening the playing field by more male sex workers or whatever; but if you are selling a service which is not about access to your body, but about meeting emotional needs for intimacy then what does this tell us about the layers of people who are being failed by other social attitudes and provision (where is the respite care for your male carer to have a social life?; where are the inclusive social attitudes to allow your disabled client to have a girlfriend - etc). It is almost like you are saying 'I see these people because there is no other way for them to be close to another person'. So - as a campaigner for social justice - the issue is why is the answer here an individual and gendered one; why is it not about social responsibility and care more generally?

That is taking sex out of the equation - but sex is not out of the equation. It is central to it. There is something deeply unsettling to me with a culture that suggests that access to women's bodies is a commodity. It is not. I believe that men in your private life may be more entitled. But it is a continuum - they are entitled because socially, in media, in advertising, women's bodies are seen as accessible, they are used as a means of sale.

I am not writing in a secure financial middle class bubble. I provide what I can myself. I guess I just think social justice is about more than what it is being portrayed as here.

Thank you for the post brazen.

Whilst I value your opinions as a current sex worker, I would respectfully suggest that you are in an enviable position within the industry. The prostitutes that I worked with (I'm not in the industry myself, but I work as a home carer - two of my service users are prostituted) were both disabled, severely addicted to heroin, and one was in a physically abusive relationship with her drug dealer/pimp. Both of these women were trapped in the most desperate circumstances that I could imagine happening in this country, and both of them expressed their hated about the nature of their 'work' and the men that they had to service. I saw the damage that having unwanted (but still 'consenting') sex with these men did to their mental health. I simply cannot agree that what those johns did to them was anything other than abuse.

I wish that there were a way of leaving the 'happy hookers' (I don't mean that as an insult, but you know what a mean...the belle de jours of the industry) free to persue sex work whilst finding a way to stop the exploitation of the more vulnerable women, but it simply does not seem possible. And while the full decriminalisation of john might help the businesses of the more secure prostitutes, it leaves the more vulnerable ones open to increased abuse. Decrimilisation only helps the top tier of sex workers imo.

Ah yes, it's always 'middle class' women who feel like this, because evidently working class women are too thick to hold an opinion that differs to yours

guess where I struggle is with the fact that there must be so many women in the positions you describe of your clients - but they either just get on with their lives or don't have the means to pay for intimacy or it is not a service worth providing.

Very VERY good point...^

And what Windy said. There's nothing wrong with being middle class, but I'm not, and neither are most of my friends who are the most anti prostitution. In fact, working class women are more likely to live near areas where women are prostituted, and see the sleaze on their own doorstep.
I think if you go up three and read some posters experiences it will be clear that not everybody is speaking from an academic point of view.
There's always a Happy Hooker in these debates. When they discuss it on The Big Questions or whatever, there's always a woman in the audience who says she is happy, she loves sex, she provides a service, everything's dandy.
And when she says it, all the men in the audience nod vigorously, with relief, because they want prostitution to be like that. They would like the option, thanks er much, and the don't want to feel like bad men.
The FACT that statistically the vast proportion of prostitutes are victims of childhood abuse, well, let's brush that under the table, because brazen is fine.
Soz, but I can't see how the government sanctioning something that is inherently immoral can ever be ok. So, your nice client, your lonely lads, won't be able to see you because it will be illegal. Feh. There are lots of things I would like to do, but can't, because they are illegal. My heart does not bleed.

It shows a lack of engagement in women's issues.

Up until recently (around 5 years ago) I would have agreed. I was genuinely baffled when I first found out that a lot feminists opposed legalising prostitution. It seemed to me counter intuitive to me, it is a female dominated 'industry' that women are making a living a from. Of course it should be legalised and society should stop demonising these women. Then I read why those feminists were against it and of course they were right. I have had similar experiences with the trans issue and surrogacy.

It's depressing really and says a lot about my own internalised misogyny that I have automatically dismissed feminist views without bothering to find the reasoning behind them.

My point is- If this was Joe Bloggs holding this view I would be disappointed but wouldn't be too hard on them. It isn't Joe Bloggs though, it's a politician I respected that should know better.

Absolutely agree with what you said there, MyCrispBag. I used to be pro-prostitution, pro-porn, pro-surrogacy and pro-trans. I didn't hesitate to call myself a feminist, either, which seems to bizarre to me now, but since researching the issues, I now recognise the extent of my internalised misogyny and how my views were influenced by patriarchy and the wider media. Radical feminism (which seems to be the only remaining brand of feminism which actually serves women, imo) is pretty much dismissed without thought as the ravings of a niche group of misandrists, but it's amazing how many women actually side with radfem views when honest debate is allowed (ie mumsnet) instead of censored. It's concerning how tightly both the liberal and right-wing media control and micro-manage the debates around women's issues. I wonder how many women out there blindly support prostitution, transwomen in women's spaces, commercial surrogacy etc, simply because they have never been exposed to any different opinions other than the libfem illusion of 'personal choice / empowerment'

Brazen - I appreciate that you are paying tax, can you tell me if you hold the relevant insurances for your job?

I'm a computer programmer, I write websites, yet I still have professional indemnity insurance, and extra house insurance to cover any third parties I have working with me on occasion.

I follow health and safety regulations regarding monitor use etc. - do you similarly follow the H&S regulation regarding personal services and body fluids?

Taxi drivers have to have health checks - do you similarly have regular checks and display a certificate proving that?

Do you think that it's common for women to have these things? Or do you think that even women working within the current law bypass these trappings of most jobs? What do you think would happen if prostitution was entirely decriminalized and you were required to have these memberships/insurances/certifications etc.

"we have a man here to explain why he doesn't find the commercialisation of women's bodies troubling, "

A man who is backed up by The World Health Organisation, UN HIV and the Law, HIV Scotland, and the Nurses Union like someone said.

And so what if there a few radical-feminists who disagree with Corbyn, there are also plenty who would agree with him (who aren't getting media publicity since it's the ones who shout the loudest we always hear about like Harriet Harman).

oh, and Amnesty International, one of if not the biggest human rights organisations in the world.

OK, so we go for regulation.

So insurance, healthchecks etc. all required. I'm sure Brazen will have no problems here.

The women (and children) at the bottom of the heap, who are doing it because they can see no other choice, who can't afford, or get the ID etc. together for their liability insurance - what do we do about them?

Are they now criminals, operating without a license? Are they just ignored (you know as they are now) - in no better position, and quite probably in a worse one (because now the people abusing them have that to hold over them too)

I just can't see a way to make prostitution into a job that helps the people who need the help - and thats before you get to my objection to the idea of people being able to buy the sexual services of women (and children, and men)

Up until recently (around 5 years ago) I would have agreed. I was genuinely baffled when I first found out that a lot feminists opposed legalising prostitution. It seemed to me counter intuitive to me, it is a female dominated 'industry' that women are making a living a from. Of course it should be legalised and society should stop demonising these women. Then I read why those feminists were against it and of course they were right

depressing really and says a lot about my own internalised misogyny that I have automatically dismissed feminist views without bothering to find the reasoning behind them

For me prostitution always seemed so self-evidently wrong I find it difficult to understand how anyone, male or female, could see it any differently. I don't actually see it as a feminist issue - by any standard of basic human it's wrong.

GTJ - good points about the absurdity of it being just another job.