Women who sell or exchange sex and coronavirus

[AnnaClick]

Hi everyone. I’m Anna and I’m one of the people in Scotland working on the urgent task of making sure women involved in all parts of the sex industry or selling or exchanging sex are able to get access to support and information and financial help right now. We know this is a really difficult and scary time and we are urgently trying to get in touch with women. We need to hear what you need and what are the best ways to get that support and help to you. We also want to make sure that decision makers know this right now too. If you are involved then it would be great to hear from you, or if you know of someone then please pass on our info. I’m available at www.click.scot/voice/ or [email protected] I’ll also be on our online chat here www.click.scot/contact/ Tuesday 11-1 and Wednesday from 2-4pm. Our online support is also available every week day from 11am-3pm – you can check out twitter for up-to-date online support times @click_scotland Thanks.

I get way too upset talking about this. Thanks Dulang for putting it so eloquently.

Prostitution is not work, it's abuse.

At a very, very basic level, if sex work was work then it would have to obey H&S legislation, and prostitutes would have to have public liability insurance for their role.

I'm a computer programmer, and my company has public liability insurance in order for me to be able to work in their office, and I have H&S protection with yearly eye tests, and appropriate furniture.

If you want to campaign to legalise prostitution, then you need to campaign for it to be actually legal, with all that that entails.

(for the avoidance of doubt, I think it is male abuse of [mainly] women, and we should help women to get out of poverty so they don't see this as their only option, and come down hard on men who think it's OK to buy women as masterbation aids)

I have many self-employed women friends who are now without income due to schools being shut and exams being abolished. They have degrees, years of experience in teaching, tuition and educational support work. They teach English, maths and science privately in homes or as agency staff in schools. They are facing bleak and uncertain economic times through these awful months ahead.

I am doing my best to give emotional and practical support to them. Many are applying to work in supermarkets. Years of experience and expertise in helping young people set aside to take less well-paid jobs to make ends meet, feed their own families and pay their rent.

Prostitution is not remotely on my radar as a profession that needs my support at this time.

Is motherhood not work then? Legal status doesn’t determine whether something is work either. Sex workers want decriminalisation so that they can have access to health and safety legislation. I already campaign for decriminalisation (evidence based policy).

Clients don’t buy sex workers. This is saying that workers don’t have boundaries and can’t consent within limits and makes it harder for workers to assert their boundaries.

@hashtaglurky sex workers are calling for all self employed workers to have better protections. Also around 50% of sex workers do have other jobs too. Many work in other industries which have also shut down. No one is asking you to support prostitution. You are being asked to support prostitutes. Supporting prostitutes me as that they aren’t forced to see the most risky clients who are taking advantage of the current situation

Prostitution is not work, it's abuse.

Yep.

Nailed it.

Great posts from Dulang

@DuLANGDuLANGDuLANG
Which is why I said it needs to have an end point and plan to save a deposit and move on.

I take your point, I missed that aspect, but i would still say that it make one set of human being far too dependent on a second set of human being, and apart from being a petrie dish for coercive control in either direction, the majority of sex workers I have known have a really distinct tendency to be more individual and independent than the norm, so that level of dependency would be forcing them against their strength and smack bang into their weaknesses.

I have always believed that it is better to facilitate and signpost a sex worker to enable her to function as independently as possible. Most of then are "job ready" and do not need counselling or direction, the difficulties are more likely to be structural, like disability, or a special needs child, or dual carer obligations...

Some of those structural problems do not have solutions at all, which is scary enough to look at, let alone live, but a business providing suitable work with a living wage is a great start. Facilitating self employment is another.

Destigmatisation so people do not have to lie themselves inside out to get an interview might achieve a great deal more than you would expect, I don't know, but it seems worth a try, BUT to do that would require abandoning a huge body of abolitionist rhetoric and facing up to looking at and accepting what kind of people sex workers really are, their real strengths, their real needs and their real limits

BUT...none of the organisations that are getting the funding are even attempting to provide any of these things...I gave up trying to reason with them 20 years ago.

It's nice to come across other people who are still trying though.

@HashtagLurky
Tell me about it...I have some super friends with their own business which is more their vocation who's lives were balanced on the edge of a cliff until the Irish government ordered their category of business to close yesterday and they could claim the COVID emergency payment available to anyone who is laid off. I know the UK isn't doing that yet (I just checked still no change www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/25/panicking-uk-self-employed-left-behind-by-covid-19-response ).

@TreestumpsAndTrampolines
*At a very, very basic level, if sex work was work then it would have to obey H&S legislation, and prostitutes would have to have public liability insurance for their role.

I'm a computer programmer, and my company has public liability insurance in order for me to be able to work in their office, and I have H&S protection with yearly eye tests, and appropriate furniture.

If you want to campaign to legalise prostitution, then you need to campaign for it to be actually legal, with all that that entails.*

Some people may not like me saying this, but what you say is absolutely true. However that is all in the future, the issue today is thousands of individuals and families left destitute in lockdown because a virus "ended the demand" along will the will.

What work is there where you would be naked with a stranger and have that person insert anything, let alone a penis, into your body, potentially causing the creation of another life? Look at how hospitals and health care providers deal with interactions with people's bodies. Can that be applied to prostitution? Would a pregnancy be a work place injury?

The notion that there can be effective H&S legislation for women in prostitution is beyond ridiculous.

Prostitution is not the exercise of consent. It's (at best) a payment in exchange for the suppression of consent.

I note that fckmmnt hasn't answered my question wondering about their interest in this issue. What other women's rights do you campaign for?

This forum is wild, according to you sex workers are all victims but are also all evil women who dredge no help

Stop making things up. No one has said prostitutes don't require help in the same way that any who has no income at the moment.

What most people have said is they utterly object to prostitution being treated as a legitimate business.

Oh and I personally don't think all prostitutes are victims. I personally include the happy hooker /Belle du Jour/ "I'm performing a useful business role" brigade as part of the problem.

"Sex worker" is of course a weasel word covering pimps, madams, minders and the like and I don't have a shred of sympathy for them.

If a woman is hungry, give her food.

If she needs shelter, give her housing.

If she needs work, give her skills.

None of this requires a woman to submit to abuse in exchange for that assistance.

Women's safety and dignity over male orgasm and ownership over our bodies.

I'm pretty used to people judging me. Prostitutes are neither morally wrong, nor evil. A world that forces them to accept transactional sex is evil. The punters who use them are evil.

Noone here is judging the victims, the women.

The happy hooker trope is tired and old and wrong. It's not realistic. Prostitution is acting.

Oh I know that- but these sorts of threads always bring out the apologists. The "it's a business like any other" "it's a valid career choice" nonsense.

"I note that fckmmnt hasn't answered my question wondering about their interest in this issue. What other women's rights do you campaign for?"
I was busy on a call discussing how to help our neighbours get food deliveries when they are self isolating. Maybe you'd like to do something useful for others too?

I work on abortion rights, housing, benefits and lots of other things.

Coming on Mumsnet FWR and acting like we are a bunch of prudes because we don’t think men should be able to purchase women’s bodies, for sex or for surrogacy is such a common trope that I should probably just stop reacting to it.

The fact we know it’s awful because some of us have actually been there doesn’t occur to them.

A current-day 20 year old who occasionally posts some solo nude selfies on fansonly for beer money doesn’t get to tell me that ‘sex work is work’ and dismiss me as a SWERF, I’ve been there, done that, and been trapped in a fancy hotel room with an angry, violent punter for twelve hours to prove it.
No need for the slogan T shirt to prove it.

It’s pretty fucking patronising to suggest being unable to sell sex in a pandemic will make prostitutes completely helpless. Almost all the women I knew through prostitution had a strong survival instinct, a turn-on-a-dime adaptability and that wild fearlessness that comes from surviving childhood abuse and never wanting to trust anyone again.
Fuck, now is the perfect time to get a temporary job in a supermarket (no time to check references too closely) and use the school-childcare-for-essential-workers. By the time things go back to normal you’ll have a legit job on your CV, have met some new people and it’ll all have been so weird in virus town you will have broken the cycle and not just lapse back to it.

The women who will truly be in danger now are those who have been trafficked, those who are in ‘relationships’ with their pimps and those who are selling sex to feed an addiction.
Not exactly the remit of the organisation in the OP.

It isn't a positive right for women to be prostituted, fuckmmt. Our bodies being used and abused is negative to women.

"Sex worker" is of course a weasel word covering pimps, madams, minders and the like and I don't have a shred of sympathy for them.

Yes, exactly. It's intended to muddy the waters.

The notion that there can be effective H&S legislation for women in prostitution is beyond ridiculous

Well exactly, which is why it can't be work.

You can't pay a surgeon to not wear their mask and gloves for example - they are confident in their profession and will obviously tell you to get knotted for both your and their safety - every dangerous industry has extensive rules around acceptable levels of risk and safeguarding.

Prostitution is simply incompatible with humane working practises, and women need help so they don't have it as their only option, and men need to be told that it's not acceptable

fkmmnt

Maybe you'd like to do something useful for others too?

What makes you think I'm not? Shaky grasp of the concept of evidence?

I see you didn't answer my question about whether you are a pimp or punter of your "friend" in a brothel. Lots of punters and pimps men, especially lefty woke bros, campaign for abortion rights. That's not solely a women's issue.

@DuLANGDuLANGDuLANG
It’s pretty patronising to suggest being unable to sell sex in a pandemic will make prostitutes completely helpless.

It is self evident that those who sell sex because they have no other viable option will be helpless if anything attacks their income

now is the perfect time to get a temporary job in a supermarket (no time to check references too closely) and use the school-childcare-for-essential-workers.

How many people do you think are competing for every single one of those jobs? Far more than usual, so that what you are saying doesn't even make sense. But there is another factor. Here in Ireland the government took a different path and the panic buying settled down far sooner. Supermarkets are well stocked and empty now, they will not be taking or keeping as many staff as they expected. The UK MAY be different in the long run, but with the same amount of shops per capita and lower income in most cases I cannot see how.

those who sell sex because they have no other viable option

What happens to women who have no viable options to earn money but have no value as sex objects for men? Or to men who have no viable options to earn money?

It is self evident that those who sell sex because they have no other viable option will be helpless if anything attacks their income

GROOMING again!

Helpless? Fuck OFF.

Stop talking women out of even trying for escape routes.

🚩 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩

@Ereshkigalangcleg"I see you didn't answer my question about whether you are a pimp or punter of your "friend" in a brothel. Lots of punters and pimps men, especially lefty woke bros, campaign for abortion rights. That's not solely a women's issue."

I'm a 39 year old woman, i'm neither a pimp nor a punter. The conspiracy theory nonsense needs to stop. I suggest looking at the twitter feeds of sex worker led projects (none of whom let bosses, third parties or clients) join and read what sex workers themselves are saying.

There's more choice, you have to - it's the only option, it's empowering, these are lies pimps and a misogynistic society tells women so they believe they have to stay in prostitution. These lies are followed by "I'll kill ya if you don't" . ...and often women get killed or hurt if they do.

Prostitution is not work, it's not an option, and there's a way out, which does not include facilitating the further use and abuse of women.