The punters are astonishingly absent
Sarah Ditum at the New Statesman:
Daria Pionko was supposed to be safe. Or safer, anyway. That, at least, was part of the thinking behind the “managed prostitution area” established in the Holbeck area of Leeds in June 2014 and officially announced the following October. It was also a tidying-up exercise, in response to locals’ concerns about living alongside street prostitution. By suspending the laws on kerb-crawling and soliciting between seven at night and seven in the morning in one non-residential part of town, Leeds City Council hoped to draw all the city’s outdoor prostitution to one unobtrusive place.
Alongside this effective decriminalisation, a Sex Work Liaison officer was appointed to work with women in prostitution, who are often (and reasonably) too fearful of the law to appeal to it. On top of this, outreach workers reported that the area made it easier for them to bring them health and social care to women in prostitution. If you have any concern at all about the wellbeing of women in prostitution, those are both excellent developments – as is the release of women from the threat of prosecution, breaking the grim cycle of punishment and crime that catches so many.
But – in spite of that, Daria Pionko was found unconscious inside the managed area, and was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. She’d been beaten on the head and face. She wasn’t the only victim of violence.
In September 2014, Abdul Fulat picked up a woman from the managed area and subjected her to a prolonged, violent sexual attack. Two months later, Anthony Riley raped and robbed a 27-year-old woman who had been selling sex there. Ten months after that, the council declared the managed area “a success”.
The violence can’t be surprising to anyone, I should think. Even if the managed area is packed with cops (which it isn’t), the cops don’t oversee the actual fucking. The john ends up alone with the woman.
Yet in official documents about the managed area, the punters are astonishingly absent, gently muffled in circumlocution. “Consider the place where the sexual transaction happens as the place where there is most risk for sex workers,” runs one recommendation from the evaluation, as though danger were a matter of geography: it’s not being away from the managed area that creates the risk, it’s being isolated with a man who has paid for sex and feels entitled to take his satisfactions from a female body…
Because the problem with prostitution always comes from one thing without which it could not exist at all: the men. A man who pays for sex knows that the woman he’s paying anticipates no satisfaction from the encounter beyond a financial reward that she may direly need (after all, there’s be no need to pay if she was having sex for her own genuine pleasure), and yet he doesn’t find anything obnoxious about purchasing her consent. Maybe it’s even a turn-on for him. How much do you have to dehumanise a woman to think it acceptable to use her like that? How much easier to be violent to someone you already see as inferior?
But at least the neighbors aren’t disturbed.
It starts by dehumanizing women, but I think it gets worse than that. I think that the prostitute has been further dehumanized. She’s a woman, yes, but still, not a woman. Not even as much respect as other women, such as wives, sisters, and mothers, who are at least “decent” women. She has been dehumanized so far below other women that it isn’t like she’s a person at all, not even the fraction of a person that other women are. She’s a blow up doll.
On the one hand, I think people have an absolute right to bodily autonomy. I can’t find the bright line in the continuum of paid employment in which one person pays money to another to perform a task (sometimes onerous or distasteful) that they would not otherwise be doing if they did not need the money.
On the other hand, I’m thinking that the people who use the services of sex-workers would have a very different answer to the question, “How would you feel if your sister, daughter, or son were a sex-worker” vs the question, “How would you feel if your sister, daughter, or son, were a cashier at WalMart.”
Theo Bromine, This is very similar to the discussion I was having with Holms over in the ‘Whorephobic’ thread. To address your first point does it help if we draw a distinction between purchasing the labour of your body vs purchasing the use of your body. Use your imagination as to what that entails, the differences and the ability to stop or modify the process at will.
I’m not saying that prostitution based on true free will, equality and respect does not and cannot exist. I’m saying that I think that represents a tiny minority of the prostitution that occurs. That lack of power and equality balance makes the industry and the act of buying a body to use exploitative (Holms and I seem to disagree on exactly where or under what circumstances that boundary lies).
Even based on the best most non-exploitative case, a body is being purchased to use. The last 150 years of general labour reform have been about improving the lot of workers and giving them the power to reclaim their freedom to work for any person and to refuse any work at will. once a prostitute is under the physical control of their buyer they are at risk of loosing bodily and mental autonomy, even if that existed initially.
Does that make sense?
Theo Bromine, it’s not impossible to theoretically imagine a world of complete equality and respect for other humans where some people may want to sell sexual services. (The first symptom of that type sex selling would be that approximately equal numbers of men and women are participating on both sides of the transaction.)
We are so far away from that world, that theory has no application to this world. What’s happening in this world is that punters, pretty much entirely men, buy body slaves, who are sometimes boys but are mostly women.
Research in which buyers were interviewed at length about their activities shows that the power trip involved is the point, not sex. The slavery is the point in our world, not some theoretical sexual transaction. After all, if it was purely about sex, these men have hands. They could accomplish release without harming anyone. But that, you’ll notice, isn’t good enough. And the fact that they’re renting does not make anything better. Rentals are treated much worse than owned properties.
Saying it’s hard to draw a line in this case is like saying that since many people do housework and gardening, it’s hard to see what’s truly all that different about pre-Civil War chattel slavery.
A prostitute who left the life said this during an interview when someone pointed out that it was really no different from cleaning houses for a living: “Yeah. I guess. If you had to clean the whole house with your tongue.”
Rob:
I’m still not seeing a bright line. What do you consider prostitution? Stripping? Exotic dancing? Posing nude for photography/painting? Sexy talk on the phone or on live camera? Acting in a pornographic movie (and what makes a movie pornographic, vs just a bit risque ? In all these cases, a body is being purchased to use. I’m thinking that it might be possible to make a distinction based on whether or not the purchased body is touched, but I expect that there is a continuum of people’s sense of what touching they care about.
My personal preference is that there be no prostitution. But I’m not expecting that will happen. I also wish there would be no people addicted to drugs. Safe injection sites seem to be a proven harm-reduction technique in that area. My pragmatic question is if there is an analogous way to reduce the harm of prostitution. The answer may be no, in which case a better solution could be to look at the root causes of why women end up as prostitutes. Perhaps the issue can be addressed by improving social, economic, educational, and mental health services. (But that depends on the powers that be having the will to devote resources to those services, which raises a pile of other questions.)
Theo, there are many cases where it is not possible to draw an exact line between one situation and another and yet for social and legal reasons we need to do so. The fact that it is not possible to find a logically definable exact point of distinction between two situations does not mean there is no distinction at all and does not mean we should not have laws or customs that make use of such a distinction. There is no defensible point at which the last heartbeat of childhood occurs and yet we have to make a legal distinction between children and adults; there is not exact speed at which it suddenly becomes dangerous to drive a car down the street outside my house and yet I could be fined for driving at 30.1 mph but not for driving at 29.9 mph. This can lead to “hard cases” and is one of the reason why the law allows the police and courts a certain amount of discretion but if we always stopped to find “bright lines” much of our civil and criminal law would never have been formulated. In the end all we can do is to come up with legal distinctions that seem to be good enough and, if they don’t turn out to be good enough, to change them.
Prostitution is an example of what Malcolm X called internal colonialism. As a general rule “sex workers” do not sell their “services” to people of the same social class as themselves but to people who are considered to be of a “higher” social class. It also has the economic effect of recycling some of the surplus from the richer parts of society to the poorer and takes away some of the economic need for such things as higher welfare benefits. This effects not just the prostitutes themselves but local businesses and hotels that get more business as a result. This in turn leads to even more economic activity. Most politicians who represent areas that include “red light” districts must be aware of this and thus there are very powerful political reasons for facilitating the “sex trade” while at the same time making it clear that one thoroughly disapproves of it.
Addressing the issue by thinking in terms of improving social, economic, educational and mental services gets things backwards in two important ways. First because from an economic point of view facilitating prostitution is one way of taking political pressure of demands for such services. Second because although a woman may be poor, badly educated, and/or mentally ill, it she was from a higher social class these things would not lead to her becoming a prostitute. Moreover, the approach suggests a subtle form of victim blaming – if only she would improve her social skills, get herself more education or read a few self-help books she could get herself out of the situation. The fact is that it is the structure of society itself that leads to prostitution and it is the fact that the existence of prostitution is economically and advantageous to many in power that keeps her there.
Theo @ 5
Maybe the problem is that you have provided examples in the grey zone between prostitution (buying a body for sex) and occupations that are derivative of sex? When you buy a prostitute you are buying the use of their body. When you buy a ticket to a strip show or phone sex you are buying the workers labour. In theory at least if they don’t like how things are going they can walk of the stage or disconnect the call. The prostitute… not so much.
So, edge cases in one way or another to be sure, and certainly with the possibility that the worker may feel it to be the best of bad options, but labour none the less. Where the ‘agreement for service’ extends to using the physical body that crosses into prostitution (without agreement it’s assault and/or rape).
Consider the following cases:
1. I ask you to clean my bathroom and toilet. They haven’t been cleaned in months and are in an appalling state [1]. You’ll be feeling wretched and wishing you had a nice desk job and despite the rubber gloves your skin is getting covered in a mess that you know contains my hair, skin cells and various bodily fluids and waste. Still the $100 is well worth the effort to pay off you debts.
I’ve purchased your labour. At the point where you find the turd in the shower you can say you’ve had enough of this and walk away, demanding payment for work to date.
2. You’re working a street hooker. I offer you $100 to **** *** **** ****** *** *** ** **** **** [2]. I’m rough and nasty. It hurts. I slap your ass during the act and call you all sorts of demeaning names. You ask me to stop but I don’t till I’ve done what we agreed.
I didn’t buy your labour. I bought your body. Even though it wasn’t what you thought it would be you didn’t have the ability to change or renegotiate circumstances.
Acting in a pornographic movie is clearly prostitution by definition! In this case all participants are prostitutes, making it a subcategory, not a new category. As to the difference between porn and merely risqué? Really? I mean sure there is some grey area and not all people will agree in any case, but you can’t imagine where the bulk of those cases would lie?
I’m not a prude. Anything but in fact. I just prefer my jollys and kinks with people who actually have a genuine choice. I’m also not a big believer in the free market and libertarian philosophy, such as it is, can go fuck itself. In pragmatic terms Bernard @ 6 makes some good points.
[1]
MayDoes not reflect reality :-)[2] In deference to those who don’t enjoy gratuitous descriptions I decided to censor that. Engage in pattern matching and imagination if you must.
In every other types of employment, it is not your body thst they have use of… one maintains full bodily autonomy. Employers may not touch you. What they hire you for is your skill set – even at Walmart that would include an ability in mathematics, social skills, etc. It is as much about your mind as your ability to use your hands. And the ability to use your hands are all an employer often requires in terms of body parts; a paraplegic in a wheelchair could still do a cashier’s position if they have the skill set mentally that’s required.
All Johns are looking for are warm wet holes to put themselves into… they don’t give one fuck about that woman’s mind. They most often don’t give one fuck about that woman, period. In fact, most hold these women in contempt. They hate them as lowly creatures, even as they use their bodies as a means of sexual satisfaction. Not one underaged or suffering woman in prostitution has been aided by a John by his notifying social services. He, frankly my dear, doesn’t give a damn.
Rob:
The examples I provided were in aid of trying to delimit the problem. (Sorry – I’m an engineer – I like to figure things out using edge cases.)
Are you saying that sex-work such as stripping and phone sex/camming should be considered in a separate category? (I did offer “touching” as a distinctive feature.)
As for the disgusting bathroom – I would guess that many employers would not be so reasonable as the one in your example, and would say, “Sorry, the job was to clean the bathroom. You are welcome to quit now, but you won’t get paid at all unless you do the entire job”. Yes, that`s unfair, nasty, and in violation of labour codes in many parts of the world, but there are plenty of people will do what they can to take advantage of those who are vulnerable.
With respect to pornography, perhaps we have different internalized definitions based on our cultural background. Some would consider that a movie that has nudity and depicts sexual intercourse is (at least soft-core) porn. Many consider magazines like Playboy and Penthouse to be pornographic.
Benard & BarbsWire:
I completely agree that the vast majority of people who sell their bodies are doing it across class (and often across race), and the disadvantaged women (in most cases) are being taken advantage of as well as objectivized by privileged men (in most cases).
To be clear, I am definitely not “sex-work positive“. I am, at most, sex-work permissive. at least for things like nude photos, stripping, phone sex, camming etc (though I acknowledge that even these are subject to concerns about consent) . My questions (especially “How would you feel if your sister, daughter, or son were a sex-worker”) were really intended for those who are sex-work positive, but I haven`t seen any on this comment thread so far.
Yeah, I have similar issues to Theo Bromine.
My opinion of prostitution is that for the most part, ignoring the odd white, middle class, PhD student, who makes money with an escort agency then a shit load more from a kiss and tell book, prostitution is something women do when they have no other financial option. Having said that, I see that as a problem relating to women’s status overall rather than a necessary condition of prostitution itself.
I’m a fairly pragmatic person so, given that it is unlikely we will be able to eradicate prostitution soon, I think harm reduction programmes are a good thing. This one was… not well thought out. My own preference would be for it to be illegal to buy sex outside a registered brothel. Brothels should have security and panic buttons for all women plus a code of conduct for men using the brothel. And standard requirements for overseas workers.
In other words, legalise it, regulate it, tax it. And for the women who continue to work outside the brothels because they can’t pass the health checks or whatever – leave them alone but come down on the punters like a ton of bricks. Make it illegal to buy sex outside a legal brothel, and illegal to receive an income from someone else selling sex.
Theo @ 9
No need to apologise for being an engineer on that basis ;-). I used to be a geochemist, then I became something else by accident, now I work in a field allied to engineering but with an odd quasi-legal overlay. Edge cases are critically important, but you can’t make initial category classifications by only looking at edge cases, you have to look at groupings of bulk data. Edge cases help refine categorisation, often by study of underlying mechanism.
Yes. Sure, they are in the category ‘sex work’. However, they sell labour. It may be work that carries social stigma because of the relationship to sex; and that may cause individuals working in that realm distress, but it’s labour. The stripper is paid to dance while people watch her, naked to be sure. How does that differ from the modern ballet companies where people pay to watch partially, even fully naked dancers? Simply that in one case the choreography of the dance, and the setting in which it occurs is sexualised. Similarly the difference between the phone sex worker and any other call centre worker. One delivers a sexual content message, the other tells you about life insurance. The labour they perform is the same and the (theoretical) rights they have to bodily autonomy are the same.
Well, maybe. hard to say on available data. Suffice to say that some people believe going outside without a burka on is pornographic. I doubt either of us fall into that category! Others do not believe in the category pornography at all. Again, I doubt either of us believe that, given that we have both used porno movies as examples.
Steamshovelmama @10
Well, you pretty much just described the current NZ situation, with the exception that we still allow street walking. As I understand it a large part of the reason for that was the suspicion that existing brothel owners of dubious ethics would find their position strengthened if they were the only option for women who were then in the trade. It takes a lot of money to set up a legal brothel in NZ and most ‘independents’ simply can’t afford to do so and either do not want to, or can’t, work from home. It’s just not politically tenable for the Government to set up and run brothels.
As I say, I used to support our legislation. However, it’s clear that while it has resulted in improvements it has not resolved some of the most glaring issues. It’s worth noting that compared to the USA we have a very good social safety net. Compared to Nordic countries probably not so much.