Prostitution; help me argue on Facebook

[MrsTerryPratchett]

I'm arguing with a friend on FB about prostitution. She is the most libfem, choosy choice, libertarian person I know. Currently at college so every second post is about gender neutral bathrooms and the like. I almost never engage.

But her argument is that most prostitution is hidden and therefore we can't know that these workers aren't happy, healthy, free and consenting. I've given her the PTSD stats and the violence and rape stats. But she is insisting that these invisible women are all loving it.

Any stats on home-based, self-employed workers? Also, I know that people here have said that workers' organisations are frequently dominated by pimps. Where's the proof of that. And, former workers who are radfem/anti-sex work and have written pieces about it?

Sorry to use your labour

I think there is a lot of sense in this video:

m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0hvr8GPV_I

This is from Rape Crisis Scotland (it's quite hard to find their definition online)

Our definition of rape and sexual assault (sexual violence) is wider than this legal definition. We define sexual violence as any unwanted sexual behaviour that causes humiliation, pain, fear or intimidation and this can include unwanted kissing and touching, forcing someone to watch sexual acts, pornography, sexual harassment or forcing a woman into prostitution

They also include financial coercion as sexual violence.

I think it's important to understand definitions. Personally i find exaggeration dangerous, rather than stimulate action, it has two psychological effects ..Firstly to make problems sound unsurmountable, and secondly to make them sound and feel unrealistic, which damages the message. There is a third effect, which is to make the world sound terrifying to women, which I would argue manifestly disempowers them.

Sorry that was the wrong article I linked to. Was this one.

www.salon.com/2013/09/27/i_post_amateur_porn_secretly/

Things can be equal if you take the focus off of piv sex. You can reach a more egalitarian approach to human sexuality if you stop making that the focus.

Sure. I am all for moving away from piv.

But the fact is that now, when people talk about sex, they mean piv, and when we talk of porn and prostitution, we mean women being subjected to piv.

And this needs to be acknowledged.

Pretending that the world is better than it actually is, is very dangerous.

(And many, many liberal feminists do it. "Oh, we don't need sex segregation, men don't rape women anymore" ... Fucking stupid. Men still rape women a lot, and even if you believe that you can educate them not to, you must acknowledge that you haven't achieved that goal right now.)

The England and Wales figures don't include those things but they do include assault by penetration and attempted rape. Regardless, it is still 85,000 women subjected to sexual violence. Quibbling over definitions doesn't reduce the real life effect of that violence.
Given that 85,000 women are subjected to sexual violence by men every year, I would say that men are a danger to women pirate.

Please stop letting people derail the thread.
It is turning into a total car crash of utter bullshit.

They could not give a hoot about perpetuating the patriarchy.

Porn producers respond to demand, there is evidence that users start to seek increasingly extreme acts as they become desensitised to the sexual imagery. This creates a demand for extreme acts (against women), which means real women are put through body-punishing acts to produce this porn....

I think this 'niche' thing about porn is a bit of a red herring. The most commonly used search word is 'teen'.

@scaryclown:
There is a third effect, which is to make the world sound terrifying to women, which I would argue manifestly disempowers them.

I don't think that is the danger. I don't think that at all.

Currently, there's so many libfems who believe that the world is a happy place and patriarchy doesn't exist anymore.

We are very far away, in the Western world, from women being disempowered by being too scared of the world - it is more a case of being disempowered by being completely deluded about the state of the world.

Sure, there's antifeminists who employ such tactics, but it is always in combination with making it appear harmless. "All men watch porn, you won't ever be able to change that - but it's okay, porn is great!" and so on.

Ultimately, the people standing up against dictators are the people who know exactly how bad it is, not those who delude themselves that it is not so very bad.

Yes, but the people who own the hubs don't care what the demand is for, just so long as there is a demand. If more and more women are making and consuming porn designed to get them off (which they are, slowly), then that's no problem to Pornhub.

Interesting stats here on what men and women search for.

www.salon.com/2015/08/24/the_porn_women_want_to_see_partner/

It is turning into a total car crash of utter bullshit.
True. I've noticed these derails "imagine a hypothetical world where harm/inequality/sexism doesn't exist- what would the rules be? Now apply and enforce those rules in this one"..
Or "imagine a person is like an inanimate object or substance? How would you treat it? That's how we should treat prostitutes".....

Bully bully bullshit!

Btw inde I am not as excited to be talking about porn or Marxism as you are on this thread.

Well..sorry about that...but I'm advancing a Marxist perspective of the sex industry. You don't have to be excited about it in if you don't want to. I just find it difficult to analyse what are economic as well as cultural operations without bringing in economics.

Viewing women as a class (which has its roots Marxism) is far more relevant.

Why Guardian? And how can you divorce the economic from the cultural n that way? Surely they intersect?

I don't see how you can discuss any form of power in society without looking at how money works.

It seems that you're premises are ideological - that you have a particular perspective and you don't want to deviate from that at all. Anything which does not fit with your viewpoint is rejected.

inde
No. Economics is relevant, but secondary to male dominance. Tackle male dominance then you tackle all forms of male violence agains women and girls including porn and prostitution.
Tackle economics and you will have improvements in the cases where the causes of male violence are economics, but not the rest.

Oh fuck off independent. We have between us written numerous detailed and intelligent posts which discuss the intersection between economic oppression and the oppression of women as a class. You have failed to engage with any of them.

Marxism offers some helpful tool to analyse the problem and feminism has taken and expanded those tools to include analysis on the position of women. The problem is that you won't engage with any of the feminist arguments, which considering you are on the feminism boards is becoming intensely irritating and hugely derailing.

I have engaged with the feminist arguments. I've argued for the Nordic Law on prostitution. I've also condemned porn and prostitution outright. Doesn't that make me a rad fem?

I think what people don't like is any deviation from a very simplistic identity politics.

Yes you have condemned them. Acknowledged. But you are making the economic case if not the sole, then the most important, factor.

Tbh independent your posts are very long and very dry, with a pontificating lecturing undertone. Plus you seem totally adamant that we are all rich right wing women which is one hell of an assumption.
Maybe you could try listening rather than being condescending and patronising? Guardian has set out very well why the economic perspective is not enough.

independentthinker21, your repetitive obsession with women's morality is getting beyond creepy.

Stop fantasizing that women want to view filmed rape as much as men. Your sick, relentless hypotheticals about "dirty girls" being sexual predators like men, being whore fuckers like men, being child rapists like men, filming prostitution to masturbate to like men ...stop.

Stop with your weird, detailed fantasies about women potentially being rapist predators, it's coming off very much like one-handed posting and the women here have heard it all before so, so many times.

Guardian, the question of whether economic class precedes gender or race and whether gender precedes race or vice versa is one that has raged for decades and is difficult to resolve.

I have said that even if we were all living beings in ideal social democratic conditions there would still be misogyny, indicating that misogyny has a cultural momentum independent of any economic arrangement. But whether that's because it's completely independent or whether it would just keep going like a wheel that carries on spinning I don't know.

Really, I don't think it makes little sense to draw a distinction between the two. Incipiently, there had to be an economic dimension to patriarchy because why else would it have begun? Men would have not have woke up one morning and collectively thought 'Let's oppress women' for no reason whatsoever. It must have had something to do with economic arrangements - to do with the beginning of agriculture, or imperialism or trade or whatever...you probably know more about that me. But there would have some sort of economic or geo-economic arrangement that made women economically dependent on men. And a whole culture of patriarchy and misogyny would have grown and become entrenched thereon.

Similarly race. Why race? Why see black people as lesser? That has to have had something to with the financial centres of power in Europe justifying themselves with a Christian ideology which implied people of other races to be lesser. That would have also legitimized slavery and colonial expansion which were of course economic operations.

I think if there was a world in which women were not in any way economically dependent on men then the culture would change. Misogyny would, as I say, continue like a wheel that carries on spinning but presumably eventually patriarchy would die. In fact that is starting now, which us why there is such rage at women atm. But for all the misogyny in our culture to go - that will take centuries.

Also, if patriarchy were to go, there would be new arrangements of power. It would in no sense be a utopia.

But I do think if you want to chance things you have to programmatically address material realities and have clear goals. Just talking amongst people who agree with you changes nothing.

Stop fantasizing that women want to view filmed rape as much as men. Your sick, relentless hypotheticals about "dirty girls" being sexual predators like men, being whore fuckers like men, being child rapists like men, filming prostitution to masturbate to like men ...stop.

I have never said that they want to do that as much as men - I'm just saying that with porn we have a public health crisis and one that is affecting girls as well as boys. And women are capable of doing bad stuff too. We can say that and still accept that the vast majority of the bad stuff us being done like men.

And please do not speak to me like that. It's completely unacceptable and I would not speak to you in such a way.

I kind of want to get involved with this thread because I feel that somewhere, buried deep within it, is an interesting conversation, but...woah, it's a car crash

Hasn't IndependentThinker been posting at length on other threads along the lines that feminisim needs socialism and vice versa?

It's coming off very much like one-handed posting
Was thinking the same myself.
Every time a bloke uses the word 'sapphic' I think "aw gaaad here we go...."