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

Because we can all accept that men don't need sex, right there and then.

If men needed sex, then all men would be raping, and/or paying for sex routinely. But they're not.

It's just a cohort of men who do it. And it's because they fancy sex; not because they need it.

If they needed it and it was genuinely that uncontrollable, then we'd be putting them under curfew or female chaperone supervision, or in extreme cases, locking them up.

Essentially...

The men who don't pay for sex, who don't rape women (the majority of men) give lie to the ones who do.

As for the 'what is the harm?' hypothetical questions about robots and women who like it etc, this article also covers the harm caused when we bypass the absolute rule on consent even if we can't pinpoint specific harm in that instance.

editor.currentaffairs.org/2017/04/now-peter-singer-argues-that-it-might-be-okay-to-rape-disabled-people/
Posted above but I'll post again because I think it's really worth a read.

YorkshireTree

That was a very interesting article. It's chilling when you take subjective things like emotion and morality out of an argument and just use logic and numbers.

It must be how sociopaths live their entire life.

Fortunately most people are not devoid of humanity or empathy.

The thing that I find the absolute gotcha is that when we suggest they service each other, they'll say that they couldn't possibly give a blow job to another man, because they're heterosexual, they don't find men attractive.

It doesn't compute in their heads that the prostituted women don't find them attractive, that they don't want to be having sex with a punter any more than that punter wants to have sex with another bloke.

Just like in rape cases - women can say that they'd never have voluntarily slept with that bloke until they are blue in the face, but it's just not believed.

It all boils down to women not being thought of as fully human, just as holes to put penises in when it comes to sex, only a nod given to any agency over which penis that is.

I agree Choc. A male friend of mine was once picked up in a gay club. Literally picked up. He was really upset about it. I was sympathetic to him but said, "yeah, that sort of thing happens to women all the time, it's scary when someone bigger than you acts like this". He was adamant it wasn't the same.

DH got it, DH's friend got it, but this bloke could not see that a large man you don't fancy messing around like that is scary whether you're male or female. He countered with, "bet you wouldn't like it if a woman..." I've been chatted up by woman. It's a lovely experience! Not interested but they have been delightful, including one woman who gave me a short lesson in feminism!

Thanks to all you wonderful women for your unflinching analyses and for finding ever more ways to explain how prostitution is incompatible with humanity.

Yorkshire thanks for that link about Pete Singer.

I concur with so much of what you all are saying up here ^^

There's something about the universal male gaze that renders the males themselves invisible, making it hard for a lot of them to imagine being acted upon (like being picked up in a gay club) or imagine women as something other that a gazed upon object who might equally mind being acted upon. It allows for the chilling detached Singer-like view.

I'd love to ask Singer "If your wife found you so annoying that she badly maimed you in your bed - could it be morally justified if she left you to bleed to death, rather than called the hospital and had to live with the inconvenience of caring for you as an invalid - which might make her feel sad?"

Don't want to start yet-another-trans thread, but this happy sex worker does not seem like a poster person for mental stability
www.vice.com/en_au/article/what-its-like-to-be-a-genderfluid-sex-worker

*Sillage I hate to me flippant but when I look at this thread in threads I'm on, you post is quoted as "Thanks to all you wonderful women for your unflinching anal". Somewhat ironic considering the topic

• be flippant, clearly!

QuentinSummers

I was a little confused by that person. Are they a transman?

She's had a conservative catholic upbringing, she has autism, identifies as a man, but is having her breasts enlarged?

So many times in the last few weeks I have read posts like this and in my head I'm thinking dear God, just be thankful you don't have to work down a mine.

This particular woman seems to be a seriously confused individual.

She should not be in the sex industry. In fact I think she would be mentally healthier if she did work down a mine.

It's very strange and very sad

Her perception is that saying "I'm a naughty girl!" is 'super-cis', and something she feels uncomfortable doing...
It's so fucked up. "I'm a naughty girl" is AGP or male-fantasy language.
It makes me sad that there are young women who have been brainwashed into believing this idea that being sexually exploited in porn/prostitution is all part of sexual self discovery and sexual self acceptance. It's all this sex-possie overlap with the trans agenda. There''s no logic to it, but it seems a whole generation has been roundly duped.

That person's own site is safe to click through to. According to it, all is hunky dory in the wonderful world of porn acting.

It makes me sad that there are young women who have been brainwashed into believing this idea that being sexually exploited in porn/prostitution is all part of sexual self discovery and sexual self acceptance

She is 44; or as her own site puts it 22 (in 1995)

I think her birth year is 1995 making her 22 years old now - so she has escorted since she was 20, been in porn since 18 (legal age in US) and made amateur queer porn before that (when she was underage)... totally being born into the sex-possie/queen theory/trans agenda confusion era. With that age I doubt she's has little exposure to radical feminist ideas -growing up in the 'TERF'- demonising climate.

Sorry you are right re her age. I was confused by the list of things she has apparently done, including being a happily retired academic.

Yes it was confusing that bit - I think she means she dropped out of college.

But I've thought about the timings a bit more- she was 18 in 2014 when she started doing paid porn, she was 15 in 2011 - when all that sex-possie/queer 'anti-TERF' stuff really was starting to kick of along with selfies, twitter, Instagram and sexting. It was a completely crazy time - along with clicktivism, etc.
I think she was a vulnerable young girl on the autistic spectrum who was ripe for getting embroiled in all that as she grew into a woman.

@MrsTerryPratchett bwahaha!

The porn actor says "encompassing me, whose body is naturally how it developed (I haven't had any plastic surgery to date). So to be shot and showcased, especially in solo scenes, as a trans body is really revolutionary"
It makes me sad that an unmodified female body is seen as "revolutionary" in porn, and described as trans. Seriously, are we on some kind of path where unless you have a perfect pornified body you can't be a woman?

I really could make almost no sense out of her article.

I actually thought she meant she had had no surgery to transition but she is somehow still being shown as trans ??? Not that she had surgery to enhance her existing female body parts.

I was a prostitute at 17. I didn't have an overly bad time of it tbh, but I'd known the guy who got me into it since I was 14 so he wasn't just some 'Street pimp' to me. It's a long-story. Technically it was "child" prostitution according to the support worker I had at the time, although I would debate that.

I'm for legalisation of prostitution in the same way I am for drug legalisation - having abortion be illegal didn't stop it, it made them more dangerous. Having alcohol illegal just made it more dangerous. Likewise, I would rather have legal government-regulated drugs that were safer and less addictive to consume, like prescription meds and tobacco etc. I view prostitution in the same way - if I want to go and get some money by laying on my back then why should I not be legally allowed to? Surely it's my body and so my choice if I charge someone for doing sexual stuff to it? I feel legalising it and creating organisations/work placesfor legal sex workers would help with the issues of street pimps/violence. If they were raped or sexually assaulted in their place of work (beds provided and condoms uses so no unprotected sex down a back alley like I used to) then it can be dealt with and justice given to that woman.

Call me a libfem but prostitution needs to be made safer for women who choose to so that, and I feel by legalising it and creating work places for them... it may help reduce the numbers of women forced into it through violence/drug addiction etc.

Let's forget about the Eastern European girls pimped out by gangsters a minute and focus on the independent escorts and just deconstruct this. Why do these women work as prostitutes? No one really asks this question. There must be a reason. Presumably it's not purely because they enjoy it and find it 'empowering' (although some individuals claim to).

They do it for a reason that's blindingly obvious: money. How much do you get paid as a waitress, care assistant or checkout operator these days? Minimum wage I guess - about £7.50 an hour. How much do you get paid as a prostitute? Probably around £100 an hour. Go figure. This is not just a cultural problem, it is in an economic one. In a 'gig economy' people will make money in whatever ways they can - whether renting out their flate on Airbnb, being a taxi driver for Uber or prostitution/porn/sex chat. There is a reason why it's mainly not women from higher socioeconomic brackets and the cultural middle-class who become prostitutes (other than the odd 'Belle De Jour' type). They don't have to. They can have careers with 40K rather than 15K annual salaries.

If we really want an end to prostitution we need a society in which women do not feel they need to do this in the first place. The government should enforce a living wage, an end to zero hours contracts social housing and probably a universal basic income too. And sorry, but that will mean us all paying a lot more tax. Enforce the Nordic model at the same time if you want, but unless you remove the economic imperative for women to resort to prostitution in the first place then it will continue to exist.