So, the sex "work" "debate"

[FizzyDizzy121]

Having looked through a lot of older threads here, I'm asking for some help.

Do you have a DP or family member that you fundamentally disagree with on a topic as black and white (to me) as sex "work"?

In my younger years, I was very much in favour of choice feminism, including in areas such as prostitution. I believed that the pushback was motivated by our issues around sex and that if a woman (usually) wants to run a business that way, supply and demand right? I did argue for better protections, H&S involvement etc.

Now, my whole approach changed a few years back. Buying consent makes me very, very uneasy and I would argue is a form of coercion/distress rather than freely given. Men (usually) who "visit" prostitutes are having sex with someone they KNOW wouldn't have sex with them if there wasnt money involved which is dodgy on so many grounds.
And all that is before we get to the amount of assaults, trafficking etc involved.

My DP is pretty left leaning (as am I) and views all work as unjust. Humans shouldn't have to be coerced to do labour in order to pay for essentials like shelter or food. And he sees sex "work" as within this bracket. Its exploitation but not any different than a retail worker for example. He says he'd be happy for his relative to be involved in sex "work", he argues the money changing hands is not buying the woman but the labour of the woman (I.e. the sex) for a set amount of time.

How do you respond to such thinking? Does it impact show you think of the other person?

Any thoughts/comments gratefully received

The Nursing Times page is about 'female street sex workers'. It is not about sex workers in general. Dr Belinda Brooks-Gordon estimates the proportion of sex workers who work on the street is about 10%.

Tooting Bec Common in south London is a place where sex workers used to gather. I estimate that when I first went there one third of the women didn't take drugs. One third were recreational drug users - lots of young people take drugs. One third were addicts.

When the police started handing out ASBOs the first to disappear were the non-drug users. Then the recreational drug users, leaving the addicts. So if you were to say that 100% of street sex workers were addicts I could believe that because the legal situation has made it so.

So it's not right to say that most sex workers are like the ones mentioned in the Nursing Times.

@blindinglyobviouslight
*
it is obvious the injuries she describes are directly the result of prostitution, as she points out. You don't need to achieve statistical significance to know that it is not 'just chance' that those women are presenting with those injuries.*
Lots of people who work with heavy machinery are injured and some die. It's a direct result of the job and a known risk but me saying that means literally nothing without knowing the numbers involved.
That's my point in regards to the report. The author makes a point of not noting the frequency and you're filling in the blanks with the worst case scenario.
And literally every condition you listen can be present on a person who has had nothing but consensual sex with no money exchange. I haven't run into any of them myself (sex worker or not) but I'm not a gynaecologist.

@ApplePlumPie
I wouldn't bur I wouldn't particularly want to be proctologist or a person who maintains sewage systems, which is why I don't do those things.
I've never had a one night stand and the idea has never appealed, but I know plenty of people who enjoy them so I don't labour under the belief that my attitudes to sex are the be all and end all (as some here seem to).

You could look at dancers, bouncers, manual labourers, massage therapists

Dancers are artists, artists have insurance and a charity just for them. They are also trained.
Bouncers are generally bigger than average, and are trained and paid decentishly, also have insurance, probably have charity for them.
Manual labourers are trained, have health and safety rules to follow, are insured, have a charity.
Massage therapists are trained, paid reasonably.

None of the above or any other job you can think of require having sex several times a day with the risk of all the various sexual diseases or harms.

@Gurufloof
The thing that separates sex work from these jobs and makes them more dangerous is it's legal status.
When there are obvious jobs that accept death as a managed risk, it's difficult to argue that sex work is inherently and uniquely risk-laden.

@jennywhitehorsesnnywhitehorses

<a class="break-all" href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmhaff/26/26.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwi65uWU1vjsAhVrQRUIHVWWDwIQFjABegQICBAF&usg=AOvVaw2Ml9NjfCwoDskkQHsp7HiP" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmhaff/26/26.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwi65uWU1vjsAhVrQRUIHVWWDwIQFjABegQICBAF&usg=AOvVaw2Ml9NjfCwoDskkQHsp7HiP

Even the government, or Wikipedia admit that it is at least 25% actually

@SicklyToaster

Actually if you look at the EU report I posted earlier, legalising it simply increases trafficking. See Germany.

The only European country successfully managing prostitution is Sweden.

When someone dies as a result of an accident with heavy machinery, there's an accident enquiry. Was the machine properly maintained? Was the safety guard in place? Was the operative properly trained? Had the operative cut corners? And if so, was this his/her own choice, or down to excessive pressure on productivity?

When a prostitute ends up with a rectal prolapse, it's not because she's not been following safety procedures for the "job". It's because the "job" is inherently unsafe. Being banged up the arse repeatedly by punters who don't give a shit about you is pretty much inevitably going to lead to that outcome.

As for the fatuous "well different people have different sexual tastes" claim - so they do. Some men get their sexual jollies from raping women. Some men get their sexual jollies from raping children. Just because someone has a certain set of sexual preferences doesn't make those preferences okay. Being a punter is only a tiny step removed from being a rapist. Furthermore, when you look at the fact that prostitutes are something like 20 times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted than women in the general population - and our baseline risk is already 1 in four, you realise that in fact there's a huge, huge overlap between punters and rapists. These are the same men.

How anyone can defend this as "just one sexual preference among many, as any broad-minded man about town must surely recognise" with a straight face, like they were talking about the difference between fancying blondes and fancying brunettes, is just beyond me.

@SicklyToaster but why won’t you accept money in return for sex ? So what if you don’t really want to - after all it is just a bodily function. Most prostitutes don’t actually want to do it so what’s the difference?

@chickenyhead

"According to the Sex Work Research Hub, street based sex workers comprise just over a quarter of sex workers in the UK, with the remainder working in diverse indoor settings, particularly in independent work. In a recent survey of sex workers conducted by Dr Mary Laing, 87% of the 218 respondents worked independently, 4% in a brothel, sauna or parlour, 4% escorted through an agency, 3% were street based and the remainder worked in another part of the sex industry."

So there seems to be a difference of opinion within the same paragraph. 25% or 3%?

The difficulty is the sources. Sex workers won't come forward apparently.

Lots of people who work with heavy machinery are injured and some die. It's a direct result of the job

No. What you are describing here are accidents. Where something has gone wrong.

That is fundamentally different from what is happening to the prostitutes. They are not having accidents. This injuries and harms they are experiencing are a direct result of the normal function of being prostitutes.

And literally every condition you listen can be present on a person who has had nothing but consensual sex with no money exchange. I haven't run into any of them myself (sex worker or not) but I'm not a gynaecologist
Clearly you are not. As I explained upthread, you clearly have no understanding of how female arousal works and how it is required for pain free sex. But anyway, it is untrue to state all those conditions are present in consensual sex - if that were the case, the gynaecologist would clearly not have felt the need to write that article.
She wrote it because she was seeing an unusual presentation in a particular patient group. And she thought that was worthy of making public, as a health concern of that particular group of women.

And really, the arrogance of you telling a group of women that we are wrong to think that us women don't experience those conditions from normal sex. Do you seriously not think that we would have heard of those amongst our peer group? Do you seriously think we don't know what the experience and psychological and physical outcomes of normal mutually enjoyable sex is?

Actually, I think the fact that the one thing our two male posters are correct about is the fact that they will never end up peddling their arses for 20 quid a pop on the streets of Soho is highly germane to the argument.

They have no skin in this game. It's all an excuse for a pseudo intellectual wank to them.

I also believe them when they say that they themselves aren't actually punters - one, past posting history suggests, is some sort of religious type who thinks all sex outside marriage is "equally bad", the other claims not to do one-night stands. And in a way that makes their position even worse. They're not even defending the indefensible out of self-interest - venal, but understandable.

Rather they're doing because being deliberately contrarian gives them an intellectual hard-on, and out of some sort of solidarity with other men - the men who do like using prostitutes. Because all for one and one for all. While simultaneously denying women the right to say "prostitution affects all women - not just the women in prostitution, but the women molested on the street by kerb crawlers, the women who try to form relationships with men, not realising that these men are iredeemably damaged by contractual sex, the young girls harrassed on the street by the spill over of attitudes that 'all women are good for is a no-strings fuck' that tolerating prostitution as a society fosters."

They allow themselves the luxury of a good intellectual wank and a bit of male solidarity precisely because they have no skin in the game, while denying us female solidarity and dismissing our arguments as emotional (prudishness, narrow mindedness etc), rather than thought out, precisely on the grounds that we do have skin in the game.

I do wish they'd fuck off. It's tiresome.

That is not the issue. The issues are:-

1. is it possible to eliminate sex work?
2. would it harm women to try?
3. can it be made safe?

@CaraDuneRedux

Absolutely!

Funny how most clients know that those women aren't consenting freely, and wouldn't want their daughters doing it.

I suspect the men on this thread are defending their "use".

@jennywhitehorses

Read the EU study above. It answers that question. Follow Sweden.

'As for the chance of being raped, most statistics are for drug-addicted street sex workers'

???

I don't really follow this at at.
This risk of rape is due to being in a one to to situation with a sexually entitled man.

There are other things that play into this eg being pimped etc but your comment reads that risk of rape is, negligible? Low? Etc for women who aren't drug addicted Street prostitutes?

Can you expand on that comment I'm not quite sure what you're getting at.

Most sex workers don't do anal sex so they're not going to get rectal prolapse

As for the chance of being raped, most statistics are for drug-addicted street sex workers

I'm sorry you appear to be saying it's all ok because MOST prostitutes dont do anal?
And its waaaay more likely for the drug addict prostitutes to be raped, and that's ok?

Is that really what your saying? I cant quite believe it, think I must have got the wrong end of it.

I think a lot of men do get a kick out of reminding women that plenty of men see them as a set of orifices that can be potentially bought, and that is perfectly fine.

How many straight men have been offered sex by a money by a man they don't know who is twice their size? When they're a teen or young adult.

I think the they find it impossible to imagine how that feels as they're not used to being seen as 2D sex objects by a large minority of society.

Oh and most of those drug addicted sex workers became addicts after they entered sex work!

How does that poster know what sex workers do or don't do?

Or are all sex related roles being included in order to skew the stats..?

I'd be surprised anyway. Most men want anal these days due to it being standard in porn. I can't see getting very far as a prostitute with refusing to do what must be right up there on the the list of things men want to do.

Jenny I wasn't ignoring your point, I merely cross-posted.

I have a deal of respect for the minimise harm position. But two points:

1. You have to demonstrate that decrim does minimise harm, and as the table chickeny posted shows, the Nordic model appears (on the numbers) to minimise harm more effectively than say, the decrim approach of Germany.

2. "It's always happened and we'll never get rid of it entirely" is not in and of itself an argument for decrim. It probably does work as an argument for cannibis legalisation, for example, but not as an argument for the decriminalisation of murder. You might personally think prostitution is closer to marajuana use than murder; I would argue that given the hugely increased rates of being on the receiving end of rape, physical assault and murder among women in prostution, criminalising the punters is a damn good idea. Because the problem is not the legality or otherwise, it's the personality type of the sort of man who thinks he's entitled to use prostitutes.

Hence why the Nordic model is such a good idea - you're criminalising the punters, the people who actually commit the crimes.

Of course the Nordic model has to be supplemented with a decent social security safety net, and good support for exiting prostitution.

@jennywhitehorses

Legalisation doesn't work. Men that cannot afford them rape.

www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/voices/prostitution-decriminalisation-sexual-violence-stis-reduction-sex-work-exploitation-a8120631.html%3famp

As far back as 2004, Dutch politicians and a number of police officers and citizens were admitting that legalisation had been an unmitigated disaster, and had delivered the opposite that it had promised. The sex-trade survivors who had been prostituted under decriminalisation or legalisation that I interviewed for my book told me that esteem had never been lower for them than when the punters were legitimised, and could treat the women however they wished because they had no fear of the long arm of the law.

@blindinglyobviouslight

No. What you are describing here are accidents. Where something has gone wrong.
That is fundamentally different from what is happening to the prostitutes. They are not having accidents. This injuries and harms they are experiencing are a direct result of the normal function of being prostitutes.

You think that when men pay for prostitutes, their primary goal is to give (or receive) HIV, herpes, prolapses and hip displacement?
We'd have to agree to disagree on that.
I'd imagine that most sex workers take steps to avoid these things and when it does happen, it's unintentional (sort of like an accident).
Most sex workers demand condom use and I'd say that the majority don't engage in anal sex.
This is an attempt at mitigating the risks, specifically because it can lead to a trip to a gyno and becoming a shocking anecdote.
That said, people do have consensual unprotected sex and consensual anal sex.
Sometimes they do this without a thorough risk assessment and the outcomes are poor.
This is not unique to sex work

But anyway, it is untrue to state all those conditions are present in consensual sex - if that were the case, the gynaecologist would clearly not have felt the need to write that article.
She wrote it because she was seeing an unusual presentation in a particular patient group. And she thought that was worthy of making public, as a health concern of that particular group of women.

You seem to have a really clear idea of the author's intentions. You seem able to divine things that weren't actually in the text (though, tbf, you seem to think you're able to do the same with me).

Most of the people presenting with these conditions will not be sex workers, so yes, it can be a consequence of "mutually enjoyable sex". I'm sure you can agree in the case of herpes and HIV but I assure you that you can do a quick google search and have the rest confirmed.

There isn't even an argument to be made here.

@CaraDuneRedux
My point is simply that whilst men want sex and are happy to pay, there will be women who are content to take money for sex. The narrative that every woman involved in sex work is there because of a lack of options reinforces a lot of the ills involved.
A woman who says "as a job, I don't mind it, but I'd like the legal protections afforded to any other member of the workforce" is ignored in favour of uninvolved people who just get the ick at the thought of sex being exchanged for money.
It's extremely shortsighted. Who is this debate for?
The sex workers who have followed the same though process we all do when we're deciding how we make money (what can I do? what will people pay me for? how much do I want and am I comfortable with what I need to do to get it?) and the punters aren't listening to you.