Sophie Walker on criminalising the men who buy sex in the Guardian

[QueenOfQuacks]

"Let’s criminalise the men buying sex, and spare the women they exploit"

link

What men are saying on Twitter:

"sexwork prohibitionists tend to be abortion prohibitionists too. They both have a lot in common afterall."

"Good luck ending the oldest profession."

"Absolute garbage is what the Nordic model is. Not only it's illogical impractical and downright stupid, but totally unjust from a legal & ethical perspective when you only criminalise the buyer."

"You seem so horribly ill informed and against the free choice of those who choose to earn a living this way."

"Aren't you pro choice? An adult woman or man or whichever can choose what to do with their bodies."

"Perhaps if you supported a wider acceptance of prostitution in soceity at large, the public might be better able to assist in shutting down sex trafficking."

"men are not buying power, they are buying sex.[...] This entire piece is full of these miscomprehensions"

"Don't worry. Thanks to Feminist provoked decreas of Marriage Institution and flourishing Slut Culture with huge numbers of Sexually Available women this demand will soon end Naturally."

NotTerfNorCis
Lots of men in the comments arguing that you can't get rid of something by criminalising it, so why bother.

That feels like the exact opposite of 'but violence towards women is illegal so what do you want me, as a non violent man, to do about it?'

Not one woman can be free and equal to men so long as any woman is sold by and to them. As long as we normalise the idea that “some” women can be ordered and thrown about like a product from Amazon, then all women live in a world where the threat of violence keeps us in our place.

“You must ask yourself, what are they buying? It’s power. It’s a very powerful thing to have control of somebody’s body in that way. It’s a power fix and they know it.”

I do agree with some of the comments that these statements are poor arguments.

So far as the first it ignores the small but equally vulnerable numbers of boys and young men in prostitution. I think the case is stronger if it acknowledges that prostitution creates a class of people who it is acceptable to hire for sex. A them and us.

The second part of the sentence doesn't logically follow. My objection to prostitution is not because I think I live in a world where the threat of violence keeps me in my place. My objection is that prostitution creates a coarse and brutalised society, a less civilsed society for all of us - but the persons who suffer are the "them" not the "us"

So far as the second , whilst I don't discount the power element it is the power to have sex with no constraints, no obligation to the other person. I am not convinced that any punter would say or recognise it is a power fix. It is too easy to say "no, it's just sex" and that loses credibility.

This on the other hand was one of the standout idiotic comments
If someone enjoys sex and is in full control of the situation and is well paid for their actions it seems perfectly logical to assume they would be happy to get paid for doing it

Do men really not understand that even for the most (for want of a better word) promiscuous woman enjoying sex still requires a bloke they fancy? Owning a working penis really isn't enough.

And tbh most people aren't particularly attractive. I mean most people do find a partner who they think is lovely even if the rest of the world doesn't see it. But the number of men a woman is likely to meet who are so attractive that without knowing anything about them or getting to know them, she will think "yeah I'll shag him" is miniscule.

Pop up brothels are increasingly using trafficked women.

Criminalising the men who use prostitutes is part of the Nordic Model.

Excellent article.

UghNotTerfNotCis Twitter really is a sewer. Those comments span the full spectrum of misogyny from lefty brocislist to alt right

Queenofquacks- my apologies. I am just sick of guardian hacks culling MN for column inches (as much, if not more than DM).

If you are interested in what prostitutes really think and not what feminist say about them look at there website.
Prostitutes collective.net.

Well you know it's a funny thing but I've actually met a fair few prostitutes in my life. In my past life pre having kids and settling down I had a fairly chaotic lifestyle. Left home as a teenager, had a string much older boyfriends who were hard drug users, slept rough in several large cities etc. And during those years I met A LOT of sex workers.

Not one of them would have said they found it "empowering". Not one of them ever got listened to by anone tbh. They were all drug addicts, most of them alcoholics too, many with serious mental health issues. They weren't making a choice to sell sex, they had no fucking choice - they were heroin and crack users, they were compelled to find the money somehow for their next bag (and usually for their boyfriends next bag too). They were the women that shout and fall over and throw up in the street in the daytime and have open sores round their lips and track marks on their arms and can't always string a sentence together properly. The women that Nice People move away from in queues and on the bus. If you bothered to talk to them you'd find abusive childhoods that carried on and turned into abusive relationships as an adult and children taken into care against their wishes and stories of abuse at the hands of men that genuinely still haunt me now, 20 years later.

They were not happy. The things they did for the men that paid (if they were lucky, sometimes the men beat them up and didn't pay) did not make them feel "empowered". It wasn't done out of true "choice" - how else could they earn the money they so desperately needed? Nobody was going to employ them in fucking Tesco FFS.

So yeah. I have met and listened to quite a lot of prostitutes and that's how I ended up feeling the way I do on the issue.

Really Vicky? You reckon many 16yos, trafficked from Vietnam, Macedonia and Nigeria, contribute there then?

"My objection to prostitution is not because I think I live in a world where the threat of violence keeps me in my place. My objection is that prostitution creates a coarse and brutalised society, a less civilsed society for all of us - but the persons who suffer are the "them" not the 'us'"

Not following your logic here. Is it that you think you're not included in category Woman with the rest of "us", or that you think you're the mythical Cool Girl whom men, as a planet-wide collective, don't think of as three holes and two tits?

Always the assumption that we live in, oh IDK, a hand woven lentil cave or something, and have no experience of the subject matter.
Every. fucking. thread.

Not following your logic here. Is it that you think you're not included in category Woman with the rest of "us", or that you think you're the mythical Cool Girl whom men, as a planet-wide collective, don't think of as three holes and two tits?

Up to you - you can use the typical rad fem language like that which engages no one other than your fellow rad fems - which is what ahe was doing in the passages I quoted or you could use the language and arguments that is on the "We don't buy it" website.

Good post QueenOfQuacks. There's a reason more than 40% of prostitutes in the UK were in the looked after system as children. Girls (and boys) in care don't sit there dreaming of a career in sex work while girls (and boys) in stable homes dream of becoming doctors and teachers. It's not a career choice.

Always the assumption that we live in, oh IDK, a hand woven lentil cave or something, and have no experience of the subject matter.

Bloody infuriating and insulting isn't it. The assumption that we are speaking from ivory towers with no lived experience of the issues we hold opinions on.

Bloody infuriating and insulting isn't it. The assumption that we are speaking from ivory towers with no lived experience of the issues we hold opinions on

To be fair, I have no lived experience whatsoever on this one.

So "radfems are icky" Cool Girl then.

The We Don't Buy It campaign was conceived of and is led by radical feminists.

This is really good. I'm toying with rejoining WEP.

To be fair, I have no lived experience whatsoever on this one.

Yep me too. And I know no prostitutes.... which tbh kinda makes me wonder why not if it's some kind of career option for the average girl .

Really Vicky? You reckon many 16yos, trafficked from Vietnam, Macedonia and Nigeria, contribute there then?

And if they did there is something called Stockholm syndrome....

The We Don't Buy It campaign was conceived of and is led by radical feminists.

Not according to the thread on it. It was set up by a guy.

I have known thousands of prostituted women. Out of all the reasons they gave for doing what they did neither power nor the illusion of power were mentioned.

So "radfems are icky" Cool Girl then

Do not invent things I have not said. And putting quotation marks round it does not make it less of an invention. And the "Cool Girl" insult is trite and tedious.

I don't often swear but I'll make an exception here , for fuck's sake if you think I'm a "Cool Girl" on this subject you really should try getting out of your echo chamber.

The We Don't Buy It campaign was conceived of and is led by radical feminists

This is what I was referring to. Rachel Moran may well be a radical feminist- I doubt the other 2 are.

wedontbuyit.eu/

Men are being asked to support the new campaign “Prostitution – We Don’t Buy It”, which was launched today by Jill Meagher’s husband Tom, as well as the Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald and Sex trade survivor and activist Rachel Moran

Channel 5 tonight.
The sex business, working from home.
Looks interesting!!!.

A decent man used to hang out with once left a party we were at to attend a bachelor party for his brother, and when he came back to the party later I heard him explain why. He said the group was moving to a strip club and that was "tacky" so he left.

Your comments remind me of his posturing that it was nothing about women being mistreated and disrespected that bothered him, no no, it's just strip clubs are in bad taste and too "coarse and brutalised" for his refined palate. Caring about women is for sissies, being an arbiter of classy culture is the dandy role of intellectuals.

Mia de Faoite spent six years in prostitution and you are not respecting her experiences when you interject with "she's got bad arguments, johns say they pay for sex for sex and not power so she's wrong, and anyways why is she being exclusionary of prostituted boys and men because not ALL prostitutes are women?"

I know you're think you're logical and tactical, but it comes off as arrogantly dismissive of Mia and you have no claim on knowing more than her. The team behind We Don't Buy It, like most radical feminist groups, explicitly centers the experiences of Rachel Moran and other survivors. It’s not an equal partnership between cold percentages of 33.3% bodies involved as you have assumed, radfem survivors “conceive of and lead” these initiatives.