R4 Sunday religious sex workers

[ExiledElsie]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/live:bbcradioo_fourfm?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

Surprising section on Sunday on R4 about sex work. All about opportunities for extra income, how it interacts with religion.

I don't believe that a choice between being destitute or performing sex acts for money can - by any measure - meaningfully be called a 'choice'.

I think you all are being really unfair here…

of course the consensus must be that this is one of many choices women make freely, maybe not the best but indeed a free choice.

if we started to post link about background of sexual assault as children, traumas, PTSD after prostitution etc, men who likes to visit prostitutes would find it more difficult to get an erection when paying for sex with a damaged and traumatised woman.

and women who want men to be happy would not want that to happy. They would probably not be prostitutes themselves, but they are comforted by the thought that the poor men can buy sex from someone else.

bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-244X-6-24

www.mumsnet.com/talk/guest_posts/2799410-Guest-post-I-didnt-think-of-my-prostitution-as-traumatic-but-it-left-me-with-PTSD

Stop being so mean here, let’s pretend for the sake of the poor men…!!

if we started to post link about background of sexual assault as children, traumas, PTSD after prostitution etc, men who likes to visit prostitutes would find it more difficult to get an erection when paying for sex with a damaged and traumatised woman.

I think you credit men with too much compassion. If this were true prostitution would have died out long ago and rape would be as rare as murder. These men know exactly what they are doing to women.

CuriouslyDifferent · Today 06:55

“i knew a lot of escorts when i went through uni…. All single, no heavy drugs, no coercion, lots of lovely people who went on to have good careers and happy relationships after their degrees”

As you say you knew lots, how did you come to know them? Were they fellow students?

If so, is getting money from people paying you for sex the new form of student grant/loan?

If so, if you have/had daughters, would you want them to try to get money this way?

Even if these are students, I would bet anything most have been abused in the past in some way and have low self-worth believing their only value is sex, or else they trying to regain ‘control’ by the selling in some way.

‘Escort’ here seems to be a euphemism for more expensive sex selling.

In a way you seem to be suggesting these are ‘lovely’ people doing something good and useful and doing themselves no harm.

This is not really liberation for women.

They are punters. That's how come they "know" so many prostituted women.

It is nonsense to say that prostitution is the only alternative to “starvation”. We live in a country with laws on minimum wage, and a system of welfare benefits. No woman has to choose to prostitute herself to buy food - she is either servicing a drug habit or has been coerced by a pimp - who may have been the one who got her hooked on drugs in the first place.

Always interesting to witness the mental gymnastics of men who really, really want to buy non consensual sex

fucking sad cases

Babdoc · Today 09:12
It is nonsense to say that prostitution is the only alternative to “starvation”. We live in a country with laws on minimum wage, and a system of welfare benefits. No woman has to choose to prostitute herself to buy food - she is either servicing a drug habit or has been coerced by a pimp - who may have been the one who got her hooked on drugs in the first place.

I think you don’t know how wrong, or how complicated ‘Universal Credit’ can be.
(See the brilliant film “I, Daniel Blake” to get some idea.)
Also, life can take a desperate turn from drugs and addiction.

On a slightly separate point, here is an excerpt from a study about the prevalence of past abuse among prostituted people ‘choosing’ sex work.

In the present study, the relationships between the level of childhood maltreatment and involvement in sex work were examined using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ) as part of an extensive interview protocol in an ongoing prospective cohort study of street-involved youth in Vancouver Canada.

Between September 2005 and June 2006, 361 youth were recruited using extensive outreach methods and snowball sampling. The prevalence rates for abuse in the sample were 73% for physical abuse; 32.4% for sexual abuse; 86.8% for emotional abuse; 84.5% for physical neglect; and 93% for emotional neglect.

Univariate and logistic regression analyses demonstrated that not only was sexual abuse independently associated with sex work, but emotional abuse was as well. These findings have implications for early intervention efforts aimed at vulnerable, high risk youth populations as well as intervention strategies for active sex trade workers.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2254224/

If a woman is starving, you feed her, you don’t stick her dick in her.

*your

Jesus fucking Christ Mumsnet is a time
limited edit function that much of an ask?

Kindly don't make assumptions about me. I could be a punter, or I could be a woman who was sexually assaulted. I don't owe you my story and you're not entitled to make assumptions about me in order to reply.

I'm not saying sw is a good option or that it empowers women and all that BS. All I'm saying is that it's a choice some destitute women make. And as such, to call it rape is a slap in the face to actual rape victims.

Rape is when someone has sex with you against your will. When you choose to sell sexual favours, even out of desperation, that is a choice and anyone who buys is not a rapist. Stop conflating real rape with regret.

As an aside I pointed out that merely stopping the punters doesn't actually help sws.

Kindly don't make assumptions about me. I could be a punter, or I could be a woman who was sexually assaulted

In this forum, what matters are your opinions and you have the opinions of a punter.

Rape does not need to involve force. It is very important to be clear about that.

I was sexually abused as a child. It did not involve force, but rather a kind of emotional coercion. Adults (particularly vulnerable ones) can be coerced too.

Yeah right. Because anyone who disagrees with the term rape in this circumstance, and even finds it offensive and hurtful to real victims, can only be a punter.

@TheMarzipanDildo
Fully agree. I meant coercion rather than physical force, because as your rightly point out it's not necessarily always the case.

I'm happy to say I've never paid for sex.

I'm curious about why someone would be so coy about it. And I've been to a few places where women are punters more often (the Caribbean, sub-sharan Africa). Never felt remotely interested. Because enthusiastic consent is the minimum I want.

real victims

Women who are so desperate they try prostitution, for example?

You really do learn something new everyday....😅interested in understanding why women in these parts of the world are paying for sex?! I mean I know it happens in the UK but it's more usual I suspect for men to pay than women....

It's because the men are young and fit and virile.

It's common (though more in the form of buying them stuff they want than straight cash) in Turkey, and as the poster above mentioned, very common in the Carribbean.

I was unaware of it in sub Saharan Africa.

I get the impression male prostitution like that and is done under the umbrella/appearance of holiday romances/casual relationships in which "gifts" and sometimes cash are given at the man's request/urging. Sometimes they continue it when the woman returns home, ongoing; with requests for more "help".

It often tends to be dressed up as a relationship of sorts, rather than a set amount for whatever sex act or one hour or one night or whatever.

Yeah, it's not always so easy to see who is being most exploited in those situations. Sometimes women think they are in genuine relationships and that they are in love. I've heard of women being raped and assaulted in these situations too. I don't think women always realise they are paying for sex/a relationship. They do get genuinely taken in by the scam and often suffer hugely because of it.

It isn't really equivalent to female prostitution in some ways. But I think that there needs to be more awareness around this type of sex work.

Absolutely not. And as I said, I find this extremely offensive to actual rape victims.

People who are poor and make a choice to enter the oldest profession are doing so by choice. Albeit limited choice, and to a degree pushed into it by their circumstances, but it's a choice nonetheless.

There are always other options, as is evidenced by the millions of people slogging away in min wage jobs. Sw pays much more, but of course the risks are higher.

Whether you choose to engage the services of a sw and what you think of someone who does, is another matter entirely. But to call it rape is an insult to every woman who's actually been raped.

It isn't really equivalent to female prostitution in some ways. But I think that there needs to be more awareness around this type of sex work.

The power and financial imbalance made me very uncomfortable in Uganda. I know my mum saw it in Ghana and was similarly repulsed. Let's be honest though, it is different to prostitution destinations for men like Thailand where the women (and sometimes boys) are trafficked, deliberately addicted by pimps and start under-age as children. What I saw of it in Africa, the men were certainly 20+ not teens or younger.

I am a two times rape victim, and I don’t find it offensive at all. Prostitution is 99.9% coercion, which I, and many others, class as rape.

All prostitution does is teach men that they can get anything they want if they pay enough.

Yes, I've also been a victim of several rapes and I don't find it offensive either.

You are paying to use a woman's body. She has no means to prevent you from doing so and/or she feels she has no choice. I'd call that rape, and I'd call punters rapists.

No. This is not correct.