What is the moral difference between sex work and other forms of work?

[MooFeatures]

Hear me out. I know the two are different, and that and that a person selling their body (indeed, their consent) for sex is morally different to other types of work which they wouldn’t engage in if that financial incentive (coercion?) wasn’t present. I’m not questioning this position... I’d just like to be able to fully articulate why the two are different. All explanations gratefully received

Page 6, "There is a spectrum of experiences in prostitution -you can see that in Mumsnet threads-from the good to dire...It would be more honest to recognise some have ok experiences while others have crap ones."

You should take a break from this thread.

bd67thSaysReinstateLangCleg

I have an enormous distrust of university-based research about prostitution because university social sciences departments have been captured …. So for interests sake I looked up the affiliations of the academics whose work I have cited, they included a Centre for Public Health; departments of Social Work and Social Policy; Criminology (several different ones); Addiction Research; Geography; Social and Environmental Health; & a Dept.of Infectious diseases and epidemiology. I think to claim they have all been ideologically “captured” is rather far-fetched. The papers I cited are for the most part quantitative in nature-not a usual part of feminist or gender theorising.

I think the reason you distrust the research is it does not confirm your preformed opinions

Then after trying to pass off a quotation Copying and pasting myself from that second thread
FFS my job is pretty shit at times as coming from a real prostitute when it was from an abolitionist like yourself you say Irrelevant: the risks I listed are no less real…. and then the evidence you cite is from Belle de jour.

Yes there are risks of infection from sex (cystitis is not called the honeymoon disease for nothing) As I pointed out in a number of citations to proper peer reviewed literature (not from sociology departments)-the prevalence of STIs in prostitutes is only slightly higher than other women attending GUM clinics and in the decriminalised environment of Sydney where health workers could access brothels and perform screening the prevalence was similar to those in the general population.

I am sure on the street health in Holbeck is pretty shit (compounded by drug addiction, homelessness and violence). And we know that health of street workers is worse than those working indoors in Saunas, and massage parlours. So see Health needs and service use of parlour-based prostitutes compared with street-based prostitutes: A cross-sectional survey here and not from a sociology department but one of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.

This shows that there is a spectrum of health and experience in prostitution from the dire to good. But abolitionists insist on taking examples from the worst affected and presenting them as typical of all prostitution.

Sometimes you admit that there are some prostitutes who are ok and happy in their work but claim they are a tiny minority … for several hundred still lucky, still hanging on fine prostitutes when there are millions of poverty-stricken women . Well this is an example of the trope commonly put out by abolitionists that those who are ok with their work as prostitutes are “not representative”. For a good take down of these arguments see What is a “representative” sex worker? here.

You say you prefer to rely on on testimony from women who have exited. Well you should read the section from Hilary Kinnell’s article WHY FEMINISTS SHOULD RETHINK ON SEX WORKERS’ RIGHTS here , all is worth reading but the relevant section is entitled Personal testimonies and this section is worth quoting.
While I do not doubt that some experience their involvement in sex work in the ways we have heard so frequently described, I know numerous others that experience and/or conceptualize their involvement in sex work quite differently. This is one reason why I dislike and distrust reliance on “personal testimony” instead of objective research or collective demands, since by its very nature, personal testimony privileges certain voices above others

As an exercise I looked at the posts from over 200 current or exited prostitutes (who were the majority}. Looking at the posts of the exited just over half had what could be described as a positive experience. I am not claiming that the results are representative of those exited women who have experienced prostitution (in the sense that the proportion of each view matches those in the population of ex-prostitutes).The prostitutes who reported all have access to the internet and were overwhelmingly working indoors-only a couple had street work experience.

But what the results do show is that there is a range of experience and to claim that experiences of the “exited” or “survivors” of prostitution are always dire or traumatic (as abolitionists would have it) is simply not true. Neither is it true that all leave unscathed by their experiences. And very few (even those with bad experiences) supported the Nordic model.

So in brief abolitionists fail to recognise that prostitution represents a spectrum of experiences-constantly citing those with the worst experience as typical. They should be more honest

As an exercise I looked at the posts from over 200 current or exited prostitutes I should have pointed out these were taken from Mumsnet threads

Then after trying to pass off a quotation Copying and pasting myself from that second threadFFS my job is pretty shit at times as coming from a real prostitute

I didn't at any point claim that a prostituted woman had said that. You have lied about me there.

You keep saying that prostituted women are only slightly more likely to have STIs when reporting to GUM. Yet you ignore me when I point out that women attending GUM are not representative of all women. Many women will never attend GUM in their lives. Women attending GUM usually do so because they have reason to believe that they might have an STI. You are also completely ignoring the ban on blood donation on anyone who has had sex for drugs or money. The Blood Transfusion Service, with their evidence-based policy and access to full population data, agree with me that prostituted women are more likely to have a blood-transmittable STI such as HIV.

Prostituted women have a broad range of experiences, yes. So do factory cleaners. Factory cleaners don't face rape, pregnancy, STIs, and violence from clients as part of their working life. Many prostituted women do, and that risk is inherent to prostitution. We would not regard it as acceptable for anyone in any job to be put at risk of pregnancy, STIs, or battery as an inherent part of their working life. If only 5% of factory cleaners was put at such a risk, there would be an outcry. Yet any prostituted woman, especially those frequented by "barepunters", is at risk of pregnancy and STIs. All prostituted women are at risk of battery.

That prostituted women have diverse experiences and some have positive experiences is irrelevant. They are put at unconscionable risk as an inherent part of having sex with strange men for money or drugs and that risk should not be acceptable in a civilised society.

constantly citing those with the worst experience as typical as something that could happen to any of them, because they are women having sex with men for money or drugs.

FTFY.

They should be more honest

Says the person who lied about me a few posts ago.

insideandout3 I've read Pitcher's garbage article before well you have a very selective reading-but then I expect that from you lot. So let’s go through it:

From the Abstract: Recent policy debates in the UK and Europe have tended to frame sex work as consonant with trafficking and sexual exploitation, often drawing on the most extreme cases to exemplify the position of sex workers. These examples are frequently based on the experiences of specific groups such as street-based sex workers, who tend to encounter different working circumstances from their indoor-based counterparts and may present a broader range of social problems. Yet existing research evidence shows that street-based workers form a minority of sex workers in the UK……..this article considers how inaccurate or partial information has been used to present a misleading picture of the sex worker population in the UK

So where is the garbage?

You then go on to quote from the discussion section Treating commercial sex as work would in principle enable the infringement of sex workers’ rights to be addressed through labour laws but you did not quote from the immediately preceding section The issues raised by participants working in commercial establishments such as parlours related more to management practices and occupational health and safety…… A clear message emerging from the research was that criminalisation inhibits sex workers’ ability to work safely and their capacity to exercise agency. Treating….

It is clear from the context that the author is talking about protection from management practices that can exist in some parlours-such as fines for being late, taking deposits from the workers and not returning them, not being able to refuse clients.

She is not talking about things such as rape or violence which as you say are police matters.

You then claim that I said some prostitutes get raped every day, some don't get raped every, it evens out in the end which is a bare-faced lie, you try to wriggle out of admitting it’s a lie by saying it is equivalent to
There is a spectrum of experiences in prostitution -you can see that in Mumsnet threads-from the good to dire. Abolitionists like to cite only testimony from “survivors” and present those as typical. It would be more honest to recognise some have ok experiences while others have crap ones.

Pretty dishonest I would say.

the ban on blood donation on anyone who has had sex for drugs or money

The ban applies for three months and is in addition to the usual exhortation not to give blood as a means of getting a HIV test.

TehBewilderness I was particularly taken with your assertion that prostituted children are self employed. Troll on, troll

Where did I say that? I did not-pants on fire

"She is not talking about things such as rape or violence"

"not being able to refuse clients"

not being able to refuse clients

What's the word for when someone doesn't want to have sex but they're not able to refuse?

The pro-prostitution crowd like to forget the basics about human psychology and boundaries. Rape, sexual assault, assault is a very particular violation of body and mind - traumatic.

Ordinary day to day hard work might be tedious and difficult but jobs like cooking, cleaning, caring, labouring is the basics of survival and living. To barter time and skills in these areas is not a violation or trauma, it's how a group of humans gets along.

sexworkers are self employed

So you are claiming you didnt say this now?

Pertella sexworkers are self employed So you are claiming you didn’t say this now?

Yes they are self-employed in managed premises-just like as some hairdressers rent out chairs to independent hairdressers (who are self-employed) and the hairdressers pay a fee to the salon owner the prostitute will work in a managed premises with a similar sort of arrangement.

…. many of the women working there have been there for a long time because it suits them perfectly - a few hundred quid earned two days a week, and they never have to see any clients outside of the parlour so they can keep their personal lives completely separate. Plus, they get the extra security of not working alone, and they don't even have to deal with idiots on the phone or anything (Quote from a SAAFE thread)

Management practices in parlous vary-some take a percentage, some take a fixed fee. They are supposed to screen clients but many don’t as the management is often only interested in maximising the money they get rather than looking after their staff.

This is why proper employment legislation would be important-as it is in the decriminalised situation in New Zealand

So what's the employment status of prostituted children then?

thinkit Rape, sexual assault, assault is a very particular violation of body and mind – traumatic -yes it can be-but prostitution is not rape.

I know there are some on the radical feminist fringe who claim it is as the woman would not have sex with the man if she were not paid so the sex is unwanted-so therefore it is rape.
Prostitutes have been raped say that they well know that rape is not the same as sex in prostitution.

People have different views about sex-for some it is incredibly intimate and should only be reserved for marriage or for those you love, for others it is more recreational. Some think sex steals part of your inner soul others do not.

Over 200 current or ex- prostitutes who described their experiences on Mumsnet
Some enjoyed working as prostitutes. A few said they enjoyed the sex-or did some of the time others that they never enjoyed it or hated it and others that it was neutral (like washing the dishes) or that it was sometimes mildly unpleasant (like cleaning behind the fridge) and some that it was mostly boring or routine like going to the dentist. A few described their work as empowering many did not. Very few said they were assaulted or raped in their work many never experienced any violence and they reject the view that they had no choice in which clients they see and what acts they performed

Those reports are similar to experiences described in large scale surveys of prostitutes working indoors Beyond Gender: An Examination of Exploitation in Sex Work here and On Our Own Terms : The Working Conditions of Internet-Based Sex Workers in the UK here

In the latter report Out of the top seven characteristics chosen to describe their work, six of the characteristics were positive: 91% of sex workers described their work as 'flexible' and 66% described it as 'fun'; over half of respondents (56%) found their job 'rewarding', 'skilful', 'sociable' and 'empowering'. The main negative descriptor (the second most popular) was 'unpredictable' stated by 76% of respondents which continues to establish the precarious nature of sex work as an income generator. On the other hand, comparatively few selected the more negative descriptors for sex work. Indeed, only 15% believe their job is dehumanising and 14% believe it to be exploitative ( p7 & fig.1)

Both both these reports were on prostitutes working via the internet (who are the majority of prostitutes in the UK)

Now there are abused and coerced prostitutes who have a shit time-mostly involved in street work (which is probably about 20 % or less of the prostitution in the UK).

I am not saying these people don’t matter-but what I am saying is that the view of prostitution promulgated on threads on Mumsnet bears little relation to the experience of most prostitutes.

Pertella So what's the employment status of prostituted children then?

It’s called child abuse

Child abuse? So not work at all then?

Does this fall under the 'dire' end of the 'spectrum of experiences' you mentioned upthread? One of the crap experiences were supposed to tolerate because there are good ones to balance it out?

No not work-it is child abuse-gottit?

Oh, ok. So another way in which sex work is not like other work.

Got it.

Pertella As I eplained below 18 it is considered child abuse-NOT WORK
And I never said sexwork is like other sorts of work (it is not a job like any other)-but provision of a service for pay is work-to that extent it is like other work.

Sometimes I think you are being deliberately obtuse.

The 2009 report of Suzanne Jenkins Beyond Gender: An Examination of Exploitation in Sex Work mentioned above here I discover is largely behind a pay-wall.

A freely available summary is available here.

It is interesting as it was the first very large scale survey of those prostitutes working via the internet.

me: What's the word for when someone doesn't want to have sex but they're not able to refuse?

exponential: "People have different views about sex."

So "sex" is your answer.

You equated rape with being fined for being late to work. You equated rape with managers withholding small amounts of deposit money.

When you put "not being able to refuse sex" through a purely labor view, you minimize rape and admit you don't think it's possible to rape an indoor prostitute without falling back to sexist old stereotypes about black eyes and scratch marks proving refusal instead of a woman's spoken refusal being enough.

It is interesting as it was the first very large scale survey of those prostitutes working via the internet

Those in hunslet will be underwhelmed by this. Seeing as they "work" out in the open, year round. Also the women who live in hunslet and are harrassed by punters who think they are prostitutes or are assaulted and raped by men.

There are some resources that only dedicated pro-pimp/punter hobbyists like to cite and Suzanne Jenkins' Ph.D. paper is right up there.

The Suzanne Jenkins study was written as a PhD thesis. Suzanne Jenkins now seems to be an investigator for the health ombudsman, a worthwhile role but not exactly a thought leader. She doesn't seem to have published anything else on this topic, that I can find on the internet.

This article in the New Statesman questioned Brooke Magnanti's reliance on the study:

www.newstatesman.com/blogs/helen-lewis/2012/04/how-belle-de-jour-got-her-figures-wrong

Interestingly, Ms Jenkins seems to have commented BTL on that article:

"Just for clarity, as author of the study under discussion, I certainly don't claim my sample to be representative of the population, the sex-working population, or even escorts advertising on the internet. I would add that although I aimed to study 'escorts, many men, and women, work in more than one way/place simultaneously. e.g., many escorts work some of their week in a parlour, many started as street walkers or parlour workers before going independent. I personally interviewed over 100 sex workers and their experiences were wide-ranging - but that doesn’t mean others didn’t experienced sex work differently. Also, the question about plans to leave escort work were one of large bank of questions, and respondents were able to add explanatory data to their response, so some clarification of their meanings were elicited. Having said all that, my intention is not to promote sex work or to condemn it – it more about how the law infantilises and pathologises women and how in the name of protecting women it can place them in a more vulnerable position."

This is the only public statement I can find from Ms Jenkins.

Her belief that the law infantilises women is a subjective, political belief. She states herself that she does not believe her sample to be representative. I don't see that her paper adds anything of value to the discussion.

FloraFox predictable response from an abolitionist. Any survey that does not confirm their preformed prejudice they label as “unrepresentative” and so they ignore it.

If you had actually read Jenkin’s thesis you would have noted (p 81she says… where the target population is difficult to access, research is rarely able to achieve representativeness in any case and p 88 … the research is exploratory in nature, and I am not ensuring or implying representativeness in any way

As you know it is probably impossible to get a representative sample of a hidden population such as women and men who are prostitutes.
Most studies that are independent from abolitionist ideology will recognize their limitations in this respect and will not pretend their results to represent all sex workers; rather, they give a glimpse of what certain sex workers—those who participated in the study—experience both within and outside their work.

The problem you have Flora is that Jenkins’s research has been confirmed many times over and triangulates well with other independent research from around the world-and not just with prostitutes working via the internet.

So in the UK we have On Our Own Terms : The Working Conditions of Internet-Based Sex Workers in the UK N= 240 later expanded to N=641 here funded by the pimp-punters Wellcome trust and The Economic and Social Research Council, then we have USA
Sexual Attitudes and Experiences of 100 Internet Based Independent Sexual Service Providers here,

Canada Représentations personnelles et expérience émotionnelle de la sexualité chez des femmes offrant des services d ' escorte here then we have surveys of sexworkers operating independently in brothels and on the street from Denmark N= 328 from the pimp punter organisation Danish National Centre for Social Research
here from New Zealand N=759 Report of the Prostitution Law Review Committee on the Operation of the Prostitution Reform Act 2003 here from Queensland, Australia, Predicting the Job Satisfaction of Female Sex Workers in Queensland, Australia N=247 here which found Overall, most sex workers reported positive job satisfaction. Satisfaction was higher in women working legally and was comparable with women from the general population

I think that is probably enough to go on with. You see Flora all these studies triangulate very well with the data from the Jenkins thesis. Oh I am sure you will try and bleat “not representative” you should read this

“ What is a representative sex worker ?” here which starts Faced with a sex worker who defies the abolitionist stereotype of a person physically or economically coerced into prostitution, who thinks their job is ok and isn’t desperate to leave it (but could if s/he wanted to), and who argues that the solution to the negative aspects of sex work is decriminalisation and enforceable rights, the inevitable response is: You’re not representative and then goes on But the ones you call “particularly vulnerable” are the majority. The “less vulnerable ones” are (drum roll) not representative Precisely-that is your get out- ignore the facts why don’t you.

exponential are you arguing that a collection of studies each of which states they are not representative become representative if they all "triangulate"?

If the value of these studies is not that they are representative, what is the value you are presenting?