Empowered by 'sex work'

[Springfern]

Long time lurked on this board. Thought I'd introduce myself!

Looking for some advice. I'm firmly rad fem when it comes to so called sex work. I used to work as a support worker for prostituted women and it was such a grim and depressing job. I've spent a number of years reading about prostitution and the nordic model. This is something I feel passionately about and it makes a lot of sense to me alongside my other feminist views.

The problem is... I'm hearing more and more women arguing that sex work is 'empowering' these days. Friends, colleagues, people who I other wise respect...and its everywhere in the culture (their must be about 10 netflix shows right now which glamorise prostitution!) I find it hard to argue with or get through to them without it sounding as if I am anti women's choice (ironically). I also get very have andninvested and then am probably written off as a crazy woman! Have any of you had an success in these types of conversations? If so how? What have you said? Have you managed to change anyone's mind?

My best response at the moment is rolling my eyes and saying 'the men who pay for it feel empowered' ...I need something a bit more substantial though!

God this drives me mad! It's NOT empowering at all. I'm 20 and I know so many girls my age (and younger) that like to be 'pro-sex work' and campaign for prostitution etc. Also online there are so many young girls who make themselves insta famous out of being half naked all the time.

Empowerment is the illusion of the thing. Power is the thing itself.

How is it empowering though? No one ever explains that do they? What specific power is obtained by the sex worker in the course of their ‘job’? In what way do they feel that letting themselves be fucked by people they wouldn’t choose to fuck if those people weren’t paying to fuck empowers them? It doesn’t make sense.

Sex work is work they say, well, so is hairdressing or teaching or flipping burgers or landscape gardening but no one says that kind of work is empowering. Why not? What is it about sex work that makes it empowering when other work where you don’t have to let creepy strangers fuck you isn’t?

No, it doesn't make any sense, it's not as if sucking a is a skill or talent, is it, really? It's not a necessity, men can use their hand or a sex toy instead. With lots of other jobs, it is something that is really needed, but this is not. Men aren't going to die if they don't have access to women's bodies.

What I worry about is this being legal and unemployed women going to job centres and being told they have to take a sex ''job'' or else they'll have their money cut or stopped. It looks that's the way this ''empowering'' sh*t is headed, to me.

Saying it is empowering is like the sort of thing an abuser would tell you to convince you to do something.

I'm sure if the women doing it had an offer of another job with the same pay, they'd soon give up being sex slaves (that's how I view this, as slavery).

If it's so empowering why aren't men doing it as well then, renting out their bodies?

Most of the women saying it's empowering likely wouldn't do it themselves.

I feel it's all a bunch of people just trying to make themselves look like ''accepting'', ''good'' people. Actually, they're doing a lot of harm.

@DuMondeB I hope writing these posts isn't bringing up things that are difficult (you said you don't like to dwell on it much). They are great posts though.

You raise something that I think stands in general across our society (maybe on a tangent from this discussion), which is that when people do not understand what trauma, in this case primarily sexual, does to a child, they are blind to a lot of the underlying challenges in our society. If people don't know that girls who have been sexually abused often (not always of course, but there is an upward curve in the data) go on to become hyper sexualised in teenage years and their twenties, they cannot see why sex work could feel empowering. If their lives have been relatively safe, at least to the point where they didn't feel at threat regularly as a child, they can't understand that the ability to live with the underlying constant threat in sex work is essentially a brain injury, rather than because they are empowered. I don't say that pejoratively, I had this "injury" too and put myself in situations that my friends who'd had stable, loving upbringings couldn't tolerate. I thought they were strange at the time. Now I see they had a healthily regulated nervous system and didn't dissociate.

I read a depressing article recently by a 'sex worker' from California who was lobbying the state legislature there to change the law to try and stop the sex trafficking of young girls because sex work is self-regulating, apparently, and women who participate in it are 'empowered' and part of a great community etc etc.

She gave her account of how she found her way into sex work and it was the most depressing story of disempowerment I'd ever read. An older boyfriend got her into cam work that he took a cut of her earnings from i.e. he was her pimp, although he didn't seem to be able to see that, she progressed from that to street prostitution and then from there to working in porn. All along the way, men were making money off her body. She was being exploited but couldn't see it. All she could see was that she was 'choosing' to do what she did so it was 'empowering'.

I don't know how you change the minds of women like that. At some point, she clearly decided to construct this delusional narrative to convince herself that she was choosing to let men exploit her body for their financial gain, not being coerced into it by a lack of any other choices. How can anyone get past that level of self delusion?

@youkiddingme

I had someone argue that we all sell our bodies if we work, we just sell our muscles to stack beans or dig roads etc, and if I think selling my vagina is different to selling my arm and leg muscles that's just my hang-ups about my genitals. I still haven't worked out the answer to that one

Someone made the argument to me that a barista makes coffee all day when they don't really want to and I pointed out that unwanted coffee making is different to unwanted sex (e.g. rape). Might be helpful to rephrase something like that for the numpties you're dealing with!

Thanks for empathising, I get everything you wrote

@goosefoot
*
I would say that the radical feminist viewpoint is really quite good at pointing out the experienced realities and systemic pressures involved in sex work. But what they often don't offer people is a clear argument or idea or sense of what makes sex different than other things.*

This is exactly it! So what is a good argument about why sex is different? Is it something to do with bodily integrity/autonomy? Is it because unwanted sex is rape? I mean it has some legal recognition in that sense...

Thank you springfern for raising this, and for everyone's comments. They have all given me much to mull over.

My thoughts right now:
If women instinctively feel that men have all the power and will take sex anyway, and men see the only value a woman's body has is for their sexual gratification, does telling themselves that sex is no big deal, and sex work is empowering, make women feel less disempowered (or less painfully aware of the disempowerment imposed by a patriarchy)?

If women are getting so little from relationships that are driven by what men want, because men want what they see in porn, that the only way women can feel they get what they want is to want what they get, would getting paid for 'what they want' be empowering? (sorry that's worded SO badly!)
So the women who are advocating sex work, but not actually in it, may need that view to take the sting out of any disempowerment they feel within their relationships/society.

And if the difference of sex is minimalised then of course some would, and do, argue that rape is no big deal. For a rape survivor to do so (and I know) can be a way of processing what happened in a way they can handle. But, that has horrendous repercussions for women and society, many of which I think we are seeing. And again, how many women have to minimalise the difference between sex and anything else because it is the only way to deal with sexual trauma they have previously suffered?
I could ramble on but i'm not really going anywhere, but thank you for all the food for thought.

Yeah, the "we all have to do things we don't want to do" argument is crap. There isn't a crime of "being forced to make spreadsheets", is there? Sexual acts that we do not fully consent to usually make people feel violated. Perhaps there are other jobs that result in people feeling traumatised and violated, but in that case, people shouldn't be doing those either!

The only case I can think of is where people have to deal with other people's atrocities. I imagine the people in India trawling through Facebook posts looking for images of child abuse feel fairly violated as well. If we're arguing that prostitution is as wholesome as being paid subsistence wages for looking at child pornography all day, then you may have a debate.

DumondeB your posts are really great, and really important. Please do bung them on Medium if you can as they deserve a wide audience

What an excellent suggestion.

Prostitution has no benefits for anyone other than the literal and metaphorical wanker but does considerable harm to the women involved and to society as a whole.

Harm to society is not really the same argument as the activity being too dangerous for anyone to be allowed to choose to do it. I would say social harm is the easiest argument to make around prostitution.

But I don't think that really gets to the question of the possibility of consent which many people deny with prostitution. It's also an area that people who tend to make the pro-prostitution argument are concerned about, the implications of limiting people's capacity to consent to that degree.

That the other jobs are more socially useful - if that level of danger is so significant that a person actually cannot consent to the danger, that element is pretty irrelevant. Unless we say we allow people to be exploited if the social good is worthwhile, which I think most people wouldn't say. People think that someone who joins the military and goes into a war zone is able to consent to actions that may lead to their own deaths, sometimes certain or inevitable deaths, or a lifetime of disability.
I'd also point out that there are other sorts of very dangerous work that aren't in that vein - things like mining or fishing.

This is exactly it! So what is a good argument about why sex is different? Is it something to do with bodily integrity/autonomy? Is it because unwanted sex is rape? I mean it has some legal recognition in that sense...

I'm not sure looking to the law is likely to be fruitful. It's too derivative of our social beliefs and realities.

I think what you would have to do is look very closely at the nature of sexuality itself. The traditional conservative language that people have used to talk about this has said that certain things, like selling sex, constitute a misuse of sexuality. In a way I suppose they are saying the same kind of thing, that sex has profound physical and psychological consequences, that there can be pregnancy, that there are negative social consequences to misuse of sexuality. But that language has also been happy to use value language around all of that.

At the same time though, conservative approaches tend to apply similar thinking to things like casual sexual encounters or sex clubs etc. They are seen as not good for potential children, not good for people'd mental health, risky in terms of physical health.

I wonder if the problem many people from more progressive background have is that they are hesitant to use that kind of value language around sex, and in fact are often concerned to maintain that all these other activities that might be similar in some ways are ok, or even good. They are also concerned often to maintain that women can agree to these types of sexual relations.

I think that for sure, if you are talking to people who maintain that sex is simply an animal act with no real further implications, a sort of hobby or something you can do with little though if you choose, they are unlikely to see prostitution as somehow inherently different. So maybe the problem is really this often unspoken underlying sex positive approach and that is where you need to start?

What is your position on prostitution Goosefoot? If you think radical feminist arguments against it are inadequate you could always make some of your own.

I think it should be illegal, and I also think we need to take a careful look at how exploitation can happen in other industries.

What I think is pretty irrelevant though, the OP was having trouble talking to people who see sex as empowering. A lot of people think that way, and I would say that it is pretty clear the radical feminist argument, for some reason, isn't resonating with them.

I don't think that's just because people are too foolish to see what's in front of them. At certain times society has openly agreed prostitution is bad, for many of the same reasons rad fems today do. Lots of people sill went to prostitutes but the overall social belief was different. So why has that changed? I think it points to some underlying change in people's thinking, maybe about sex, or maybe about work, or both.

"Harm to society is not really the same argument as the activity being too dangerous for anyone to be allowed to choose to do it. "

Who do you think "society" is if not people?

"That the other jobs are more socially useful - if that level of danger is so significant that a person actually cannot consent to the danger, that element is pretty irrelevant."

It is entirely relevant to any ethical consideration. The dangers of the jobs NatashasDance listed are side effects of the profession, not the entire point for its existence. If crisis first-responders were expected to sit still and let themselves be actively harmed in the name of doing their job you would have a point, but they aren't and you don't.

Someone on Mumsnet made the analogy of prostitution to boxing, and some smart woman said that's only accurate if one boxer got to pummel the face of the other boxer who isn't allowed to protect himself or counter with his own blows. Prostitution is men actively harming women, knowingly and purposefully, not as a side effect.

Prostitution is rapists outsourcing the submission-inducing violence to pimps.

Not sure I agree with a couple of your statements Goosefoot. Society certainly agreed that prostituted women were bad. Men using prostituted women was not seen as bad though, hence prostituted women being punished whilst the customers got away with it.

"People" didn't got to prostituted women, men did. Society had nothing to say about them and what they did. It just had to be kept reasonably discrete (hide it from the wife until she gets an STD).

I'm not sure that the OP has been making radical feminist arguments, given that she's worrying about sounding as if she is anti-women's choices. Radical feminists examine men's choices, and women's lack of them. Reality in other words.

Misogyny is the reason why people support women being used in prostitution. It's not a problem with the arguments of radical feminists, we just don't get listened to because we're women arguing in support of women.

Once again, if people don't think sex is different, what would you do if your male boss said that you now have to have sex with him as part of your duties? If sex can just be a job like filing or typing or writing a report, what's wrong with that duty. How about if you were offered a big bonus to do it, say 30% of your wages. Why would you turn that down?

What if Costa Coffee now said that they'd be selling coffee and blowjobs to customers and that new barristas would have to undertake those duties. Would it be OK for them to recruit on that basis? Would they get staff?

I see it in simple terms:
Someone is paying to rape you.
Nothing empowering about that.

The jobs I listed all have a raft of rules, regulations, procedures and protocols in place to minimise risk. They have the potential to be dangerous but they are jobs which benefit society.

It would be impossible to replicate equivalent rules etc.for prostitution.

Those jobs also all to some degree confer status on the workers. People might worry about their sons or daughters doing such work but they will be proud of their children.

It is impossible to replicate that status and pride for prostitution or sex work. Nothing is going to change the minds of punters that these women are anything more than expendable garbage- the sort of women who do things nice women don't.

The "sex industry" needs to promote sex as dirty. It isn't anti- "sex industry" campaigners who are prudes. We are the ones who think consenting sex with 2 (or more if you want) adults is and should be fun- not dirty.

The European Commission put together a document in 2014 that you might find interesting which collates a lot of the academic research
www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/etudes/join/2014/493040/IPOL-FEMM_ET(2014)493040_EN.pdf

Some select statistics:

"M. Farley’s study carried out across nine countries in 2003 showed that a majority of prostitutes had experienced severe forms of violence, including sexual assault and rape. In most of the cases, they experienced various types of repeated violence. A large proportion (68%) had suffered from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), with a level of severity comparable to that experienced by Vietnam War veterans, as well as psychological dissociation."

"In addition to the violence experienced in the context of prostitution, 43% to 69% of women selling sex have suffered sexual abuse in childhood"

"More than a fifth of them reported enjoying the feeling of power over the prostitute and believed that once the customer had paid, he could do whatever he wanted with the women he bought (22%)"

"M. Farley’s interviews with 785 people in prostitution in nine countries showed that 89% of them wanted to escape prostitution but had no other options for survival"

"According to M. Farley and Di Nicola, the knowledge that the women had been exploited, coerced, or trafficked failed to deter sex buyers from buying sex .In this respect, it has to be noted that most clients are unable to identify indications of forced prostitution"

"Furthermore, it has been observed that men (around 40%) justify or tolerate prostitution because they think that buying sex reduces the likelihood of rape and, if prostitution would not exist, then the number of rapes would increase . In fact, studies from the US seem to prove the contrary (please see above, sub-chapter 1.2.5.)."

"On average 70% of the prostitutes in the EU are migrant women."

If I could make a living having sex with people I really fancy then i'd do it, as would many people, I guess.

Sadly the money is only exchanged to 'compensate' reluctance, aversion or downright repulsion. I think the woke crowd have this wank fantasy idea that prostitutes get sexual pleasure from their work when in reality they're probably working extremely hard to keep from throwing up or running away or any other natural response to having to be intimate with someone repulsive and/or dangerous.

My thoughts on sex work being 'empowering' are tempered by being the possessor of a podgy middle-aged body. Is sex work empowering for all women? Is it like an evening class where all body types and levels of attractiveness can get the benefits? Would I be able to rock up at my local gentleman's club and get work? It is obviously a job with a short shelf-life and it doesn't lead onto anything else. There are very few avenues for women getting into management/pimping.

You are right and never accept any rubbish from any other view. I am a retired female police officer and spent many years working on a vice unit in central London. I only saw exploitation misery abuse murder suicide of the ladies who were embroiled in this ghastly way of life. Even the ones with wealthy clients who had a flat for their sole use were deeply scarred. The women should not be treated as criminals but their pimps and clients should. I still remember so many cases i could write a book. The boys that became involved should not be forgotten. A truly horrible life for so many ,used and discarded.As you can see my experience has made me a ranter too.