Prosittution and rape: how men frame women's experiences

[Karabair]

Starting a new thread as a support thread was getting derailed.

It's a simple proposition - sex that a woman doesn't want is rape. Paid sex is unwanted sex, thus rape.

The idea that prostitution can merely be a transaction like any other customer service, comes from men. A woman-centred approach understands the unique experience of having another person's body parts inside your body, how intimate that is, and how violating it is if it's unwanted.

Men have created a world where women very often don't have direct access to resources we're entitled to. Thus they are able to manipulate and control women's behaviour by offering resources in return for being able to sexually harm us. A world in which women were equal in resources to men would be a world without prostitution. It's never a woman's choice, it's a man's choice.

My point is that there are some here who seem to take issue with the radfem perspective that "consent" is not a great framing of how sex should work for women, since it enables men to coerce, manipulate, and generally push at women's boundaries until we give in, possibly out of exhaustion, and then say "well she did say OK in the end". I think that as a society we can and should do better and expect men to seek active and enthusiastic desire to have sex rather than an exhausted, frightened, or beaten down "well alright then, so try to get it over with quickly".

This is relevant to the sex industry in that there are very few situations in it in which the women are enthusiastic participants. Some appear to think that's just fine and dandy. I disagree.

People feel comfortable with the status quo. It's safer. It's safer to repeat tired old thought-stopping lines like "she chose it" and "women's agency", rather than examining men's behaviour and what it means for women.

The sex positive movement has also done its best to convince women that attempts to question the status quo are an attack on them. They're not. Criticism is and always has been aimed at the way men behave, though I personally do rather lose my patience with women who're so steeped in the idea of men's entitlement to sex that they try to shut other women down when we challenge it, especially when I've seen them trying to undermine other women in multiple conversations.

Did someone on the thread say coercing women is fine? I missed it.

It’s also quite an individualistic rather than structural analysis.

No, we are doing the structural analysis and you are undermining it. By allowing a victim to define a man's behaviour as abuse or not depending on how much she's been groomed, you remove any ability to define abusive behaviour according to objective criteria in order to carry out a structural analysis of it. Giving the victim agency means not coercing her into attending counseling and not forcing her to name the perp's behaviour as abuse. We are still free to call it abuse.

I thought the law changed with dv so that there can be a prosecution if enough evidence, even if the woman does not support it.

I know there is a lot of debate about that but still, it must be the case that some things are just wrong, morally / legally

The law does seem to be moving more towards if you get a yes, or say that you got a yes, anything you have done is OK or a bit of an accident.

That is an 8ndividual approach.

The class approach is, no-one (men or women) can in law consent to x.

Because the opportunity for exploitation / damage is too high.

what's driving the want?

I'm not any kind of biologist so can't answer that. I used the word "desire" several times during my post because I'm talking about sexual desire, where your lips tingle from wanting to be kissed and you get that weird electric sensation go down your stomach. Wishing to gain money or avoid a beating wouldn't count as "desire".

Pota2: But buying sex means that you don’t care whether there is consent. That makes you equivalent to a rapist as you either know there is no consent or don’t care whether there is.

So close, yet so far. You almost described the problem, which is that men don't care how women feel about sex as long as they get their dicks wet.

When men don't require their partner's sexual desire as a precondition for sex, they don't care how she feels about it. They want "consent", which can be reluctant or coerced or paid for, so that they can claim not to be rapists, but they don't care whether we actually enjoy it, or if it hurts us, or whether we feel soiled and hollow afterwards.

If they gave a shit about us, they would recognise that consent alone is not enough.

The class approach is, no-one (men or women) can in law consent to x.

This is why I think "consent" is the wrong way to frame this stuff. Some things should be illegal regardless of whether the person on the receiving end can be pushed into technically consenting or not. The consent framework shifts the attention off the actions of the perpetrator, which is where they belong. That may not have been the original intent, but it's where we've ended up.

So, some women technically consent to prostitution? It's still wrong and it still hurts women as a class. Some woman supposedly consented to having a bottle of bleach pushing into her vagina (note - I think this is absolute nonsense and the murdering bastard that did it was lying) - again, doesn't matter if someone technically consents to that, you still shouldn't do it.

The law seems to struggle with this in a few limited cases where no women are involved too, such as the famous European case of a man who supposedly consented to being killed and eaten by a cannibal, but given the way most societies work it's not surprising that the impact on women as a class is much, much worse than the impact on men as a class.

I meant psychologically, bd. Both partners actually experiencing sexual desire for each other sounds like a reasonable prerequisite to me. I can't see a workable way of fitting it into a legal framework either.

The clarity of language is important though. Without it there's so much wiggle room to reframe violations in which we were powerless as something we wanted.

The odd thing is that with their invention of "enthusiastic consent" being a requirement for legitimate sex, the sex pozzies are almost coming at it the same way. They just weren't able to let go of the word "consent" for some reason, but wanting sex and enthusiastically consenting to it, sound almost the same to me - I think they're trying to describe the same thing. How the sex pozzies fit "I'm not having sex with you unless you pay me" into enthusiastic consent is quite another question.

Why couldn't "wanting sex" be a legal term? Asking seriously, I know "consent" sounds more formal and legalistic but if it doesn't describe the conditions to stop women being sexually harmed by men then it's useless as a concept.

Page 1 I said: I doubt that it will be possible to legislate to mandate desire though.

But we can legislate against some cases where desire is very clearly absent. If we accept that prostituted women are only consenting for money[1] and that "my poverty, but not my will, consents" is strong evidence of a lack of desire, then by criminalising the purchase of sex we legislate against a specific kind of unwanted sex. The women themselves have done nothing wrong because the men want sex so much that they are prepared to kerbcrawl and hand over money to get it, so the women can hardly be accused of sexual assaulting them.

[1]: Which they are. If a man wound down his window and said "do me for free", she wouldn't. If a man wound down his window and handed a woman £50 and drove off without fucking her, she wouldn't run after his car yelling "come back I need your cock in me", she'd be glad for the money without having to do the ickiness.

Men keep women poor because we are easier to sexually access if we can't meet our basic survival needs. Women make up the majority of the world's poor.

Universal credit: MPs call for action on women driven to 'survival sex'
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-50170297

Of course the headline should read "Men sexually prey on poor and vulnerable women"

How noting that men as a class keep women as a class poor in order to control us, is individualistic rather than a structural analysis is beyond me. It's basic Marxism applied to the situation of women.

I'm glad they're finally talking about the causal link between UC and prostitution.

Part of me's irritated that MPs didn't give much of a shit until survival sex as a result of the benefits system started to be an issue for working women as well as the unemployed. Sanctions were forcing women into prostitution even before the switch to UC.

I'm tempted to ask the following.

1. Which classes in terms of both sex and economic class do most MPs belong to?

1. Which classes benefit from impoverished women being forced into prostitution?

But sure, empowerment and all that.

I remember a long time ago when Cynthia Payne was being prosecuted for running a brothel, she said that most of the women working for her were mothers with young children because they needed the money. That's another aspect of this whole discussion that rarely gets a mention, that when mothers are desperate to feed their children, they will sometimes turn to prostitution as a selfless act. The fact that men do have the money, but aren't feeding children but rather paying desperate mothers to have sex with them instead is another disgusting aspect of all this.

On 2. Kittens I'm struggling to think of any economic class of men that doesn't benefit from it.

They do all benefit.

The bbc article on survival sex due to uc was interesting when 2 days ago they did a piece about students going into prostitution and other sex related work, to make ends meet, described it as 'adult work' and generally seemed top be ok with it.

About 2 days ago that should say

All men benefit from female prostitution and female poverty, that's the class analysis.

The term "adult work" sets my teeth on edge.

I only heard it the other day.

Seems sex work doesn't water down what is being discussed enough.

If people would stop talking down to me like I'm not a radfem that would be lovely. Yes, all men benefit from prostitution. MPs, being mostly fairly well off, have an extra layer of not giving a shit in that they're unlikely to be personally connected to any women impacted by UC.

The BBC seems to have gone full sex positive around the same time it went full pro trans, and as a result they seem to be attempting to maintain a weird position where the sex industry in developing countries is of course terrible but if it's happening in wealthier countries then that's obviously all about choice and empowerment, except when they sort of have to admit that it's not, and even then they're spinning as hard as they think they can get away with.