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

Also, there are women who like watching filmed rape. I'm not making that up. It's a fact. And it's an important fact because however few of these women there are it tells us that sexual pathology/violence/inhumanity is not just the preserve of men. It is mainly the preserve of men because men have had sexual power and they have got to dictate the dominant sexual narrative.

It's a troubling thought, but it is important .

Every time a bloke uses the word 'sapphic' I think "aw gaaad here we go....

Not my word. It's a term used to denote supposedly innocuous, high-class 'erotica' rather than porn, which is why I used it.

It's a troubling thought
Look, feminist women know all about internalised misogyny - we don't have to stretch our imaginations to know why other women who have not engaged in critical self-examination, from a feminist perspective, act in self-negating ways that uphold Patriarchy.

No I think there are women who do bad things for other reasons than patriarchy. They do it because they are bad people .

Here''s the thing independent - men who use the word 'sapphic' generally seem to have invested a bit too much of their time ahem 'researching' porn in detail for my personal comfort.

there are women who do bad things
Indeed, but when these things involve inciting male violence against women and girls (producing/consuming filmed rape) then it can be understood as bad women within a patriarchal context - rather judging it within in a vacuum of sexism.

"And women are..."

"Also, there are women..."

"these women there are..."

"there are women who..."

You are a misogynistic creep obsessed with women's morality just as much as the prior 879,675 men who came here before you to whine about "but women do it toooooo!"

I'm going to sound Freudian here (sorry everyone lol) but I think in a way, ignoring all the crap that feminists have rightly critiqued, he had a point.

Civilisation is restraint. In order to be civilized we have to restrain the pleasure principle - many of our urges and agressive feelings have to be curtailed. Infants of either sex don't do that. They wee and poo themselves wherever, scream, cry and expect immediate gratification. It is incumbent on parents to teach them how to control themselves so they can become functional adults and we have more or less functional societies.

One of the things that has to be constrained and sublimated is our sexuality. Traditionally, female sexuality has had more restraints placed on it than male sexuality - because of a male dominated culture that feared it deeply.

But now all the restraints are being removed. We have a consumer culture which reduces us all to infants, requiring endless stimulation and base gratification. For the first time women have been allowed access to the dominant economic ulture, because their desires are just as profitable as male desires. So slowly, with the Pandora's box of the internet, all the restraints placed on not only men but women for hundreds of years of Western Civilisation are being removed.

Now that is going to bring about some very strange and disturbing results I think.

Guardian I have written a thesis on porn culture and have read more Jezebel articles and interviews with eroticists than you would believe.

I think it was Gail Dines who made the point about sapphic erotica. She's a feminist I'm right behind.

"but women do it toooooo!"
I think the whole thing is a what about da menz.
The Marxist derail- an attempt to say 'WCM have it just as bad' and the porn derail - 'women are just as bad'.
So to put an end to it inde

1. Men don't have it just as bad as women.
2. Women aren't just as bad as men

You are not going to get a feminist forum to think otherwise. We know the crime stats. And any more angles and attempts to argue otherwise will out you unequivocally as a one-handed poster.

I agree with 1.

By 2 do you mean that women are not as bad in the context of patriarchy? Or that women would still not be as bad outside of it?

In other words, if women had power would they use it any more nobly than men? And if not, why not?

It's screamingly obvious that in a patriarchal culture women are not as bad as men. You only have to turn on the news to see that that's case. But whether that's because women are better in some sort of inherent sense than men or whether they've just been subdued into being good (read also submissive, passive, nurturing) is a completely different question.

inde I don't see the purpose to imagining ourselves in a post-patriarchal world.
Obviously the collective history would have been patriarchal, - who knows the means by which Patriarchy was overthrown? This would have a bearing on how power would be used and possibly abused. It is all conjecture and a bit pointless.

But whether that's because women are better in some sort of inherent sense than men or whether they've just been subdued into being good (read also submissive, passive, nurturing) is a completely different question.

Who actually gives a fuck and how is it relevant?

"if women had power would they use it any more nobly than men?"

Yes. You can see this in action every day millions of women don't spend small amounts of money (or food or drugs) forcing homeless men to perform oral sex on them.

As a counterpoint, despite the shame and sometimes deadly punishments, many women sexually cheat on husbands and partners, but they do not pay for sex. Men as a group are uniquely attracted to selfishly, utterly dominating their sex partners without a thought for their well-being.

Thankfully, most men find the idea of paying someone to withstand their sexual assault repulsive and unsatisfying, however that doesn't change the source population of pay-per-rapists being men.

Women are inherently better people than men.

sillage it makes me think of child abduction.
When a women abducts a child for herself - it is overwhelmingly because she wants to have her own kid to care for. When a man abducts a child it's because he wants to torture, rape and kill them.

It kind of is important.

It might not seem like this from a woman's perspective, but pariarchy is already in severe decline - certainly in the developed West but also in developing capitalist nations in the sub-continent.

'Male jobs' are disappearing. Your wages are going up as ours are going down. There's more of you succeeding in higher education and less of us. Equality is a long way off but the proccess has begun. And fair play really.

A primary reason for Trump and this conflagration of misogyny online is that men feel the economy and their power slowly slipping away.

If patriarchal culture and all the norms of heterosexual culture that we've been accustomed to for a long time are going to wither away, then we need to think about what culture is going to replace them.

And just saying (and this in effect is what some feminists are saying) that women should sort of be given a kind of moral free ride because they've been morally overexamined by men is not...well we can do better I think. Or there is this idea that women are naturally better than men so they can operate outside of any normative standard. That's a very dangerous idea that far from empowering women is just another myth of patriarchy - that of the mother and the fairer sex. I think it's bad to see men an women in that essentialist way.

Women are inherently better people than men.

For what reason?

patriarchy is already in severe decline
Come again?

So Sillage, if a woman, say, molests a child, she's either a mentally disturbed aberration or patriarchy is somehow acting through her? Is that what you think?

If women are inherently better people than men, there's kind of no point in feminism really is there? Do you know who used to day that women are inherently better people than men?

Men. Patriarchal men. For centuries that is how they justified a society in which women look after babies and men do all the agressive state and empire building.

Guardian, we do not have equality but a slow process of decline has begun. That's a standard view and it was one made by one of your co-feminists earlier on here.

Well personally I wouldn't describe myself as a socialist, but I don't see why we shouldn't look at the economic system when talking about feminist issues.

Someone asked you on the other thread why you think that male patterns of violence is the norm that women's behaviour will start to increase towards rather than female patterns being the norm and male violence the aberration. Maybe think on that.

It also makes you a massive gf to have been arguing on this thread for two days and only just now revealed your real standpoint.

I think your obsession with imagining scenarios of 'naughty women' in a discussion about prostitution says a lot about you.