She lost herself
Irin Carmon reviews Paid For, by Rachel Moran.
Moran started selling herself on the streets of Dublin when she was fifteen.
Moran’s seven years in the sex trade, the main subject of her book, convinced her it is never compatible with consent and always tantamount to abuse. “The summation of my experience of prostitution was simply this: I lost myself,” she writes. She warns that “Paid For” “will not read in the style of a traditional memoir,” but its arc is familiar: troubled parents, state custody and homelessness, an older boyfriend who suggested she walk the streets, hitting rock bottom, getting out with a new purpose.
So, clearly, she’s not of the “sex work is empowering” school.
“Paid For” was previously published in Ireland, where Moran helped persuade legislators to adopt the Nordic model for the sex trade, which criminalizes buyers of sex and treats sellers as exploited victims. Such a system is distinct from the full decriminalization model now advocated by Amnesty International, a move Moran has campaigned against. It differs, too, from legalization as attempted in countries like the Netherlands and Germany, which involves active state regulation, and from the full criminalization practiced in the United States (except for parts of Nevada), which offers the worst of all worlds, with the brunt falling on the most vulnerable. By treating people in the sex trade as automatic victims who require state intervention, the Nordic model has been criticized by some sex workers as the legislative equivalent of those teenage girls beating up Moran for her own good.
This fierce debate — like any policy dispute, concerning ends as much as means, values as much as evidence, pitting people who call themselves feminists against one another — lingers under the surface of “Paid For.” It is why the book reads as an argument with interlocutors who are rarely named, giving it the feel of a very long subtweet. Moran attacks from multiple directions what she argues are prevailing myths about sex work: that working indoors is safer; that some forms of sex work are “classier” than others; that selling sex can be empowering; the existence of a “happy hooker.” The biggest lie of all, she says, is that women can choose to be in prostitution. “A woman’s compliance in prostitution is a response to circumstances beyond her control,” Moran writes, “and this produces an environment which prohibits even the possibility of true consent.”
But that claim is falsified by the existence of thousands of rich women who choose to be in prostitution.
Or not.
I simply cannot imagine any woman – in comfortable circumstances, w/no threat to her well being, sitting herself down and deciding that tomorrow she will start work as a prostitute. I can only imagine a tortured consideration of other possibilities that are impossible, and as a last resort, doing sex work. I know there are probably some that do decide on it as a “career” but not very many, I bet.
I we instituted Basic Minimum Income and free college as standards, I think we would lose almost all “voluntary” prostitution: i.e. where the coercion is economic and systemic rather than direct, so that people think of it as voluntary. Combine that with the Nordic model and you get maximal justice, I think.
Greta Christina claims that the happy prostitutes number in the thousands.
I suppose “thousands” could mean 2000, and 2000 out of 7 billion people isn’t all that many…
I would be very interested in seeing her evidence for her claim. She also states that saying the prostitution is slavery, exploitive, etc disses the experiences of the thousands who love their jobs as prostitutes. I’d say not, I’d say that you can be horrified and want to end economic prostitution and not have to consider the tiny proportion (maybe) who chose it to be their job. . . I will always wonder what they tell their grandmothers, mothers, aunts, and sisters about their wonderful jobs. . .
I’m always in two minds about this. I do feel it’s important that prostitution is legal: as with prohibition, many of the ills derive from illegality. And further ills derive from social stigma – which is why “what do you tell your mother?” isn’t such a great argument. The ick factor is not a reason to make law.
I have known a few women who supported themselves through uni with part-time sex work – which paid MUCH better than the usual waitress & retail jobs. These are the lucky ones, who were not forced into it by poverty, addiction or slavery. They do not get to define what the job is like for everyone else, and they are a tiny minority globally, but they do actually exist
Clearly trafficking women is criminal: it’s kidnapping, assault, rape, torture and slavery. It remains prosecutable as such, even where selling sex for money is legal. You can’t consent on someone else’s behalf, so pimping is plain old conspiracy/accessory to rape. So why do you need prostitution itself to be illegal?
Jacqueline Comte (“Decriminalization of Sex Work: Feminist Discourses in Light of Research”, Sexuality & Culture 2014) presents an extensive overview of the research done on the topic. Here is her summary:
Decreeing in advance that all of this self-reported “choice” (especially in the phenomenon of middle class sex work) is in fact forced – oh, it just must be forced, no kidding! – strikes me as a guaranteed recipe for a lousy and dogmatic research paper. On the other hand, I find it very easy to believe that the last sentence of the quoted passage refers to situations which are not just ‘very problematic’, but horrible and tragic.
Even in this last case, I cannot think of any simple solutions. See Aoife’s text , discussing this sort of problems.
Surely whether most people are happy in sex work or find it ’empowering’ is irrelevant to the question of whether or not it should be legal, just as it would be in an argument about the legalisation of the drugs trade. However dreadful sex work may be, it can only be made worse if the women and men engaged in it have to hide from the law instead of having recourse to the law for protection. It is often said, for example, that the main occupation for pimps where prostitution is illegal is to protect the prostitutes from the police, negotiating payments in the form of cash and/or sex ‘freebies’. Legality removes that problem immediately.And iIt is an obvious slur against women to assume that brothels can only be opened or managed by men (as well as being observably false).
It is true, of course, that some people enjoy sex work or take some powerful pleasure in it (in a recent documentary about prostitution the actor Rupert Everett talked about how addictive it was), but it isn’t the salient point. The point is could the life of a working prostitute conceivably be made worse by making her (or his, it is frustrating how the very large number of male prostitutes are forgotten in this debate) trade legal.
Changing legal policies aren’t going to alter the social catastrophe that prostitution seems to present in its ‘normal’ form.
Decriminalization OUGHT to allow the law to focus on trafficking, and the safety of prostitutes. But it doesn’t seem to have done so yet. And, trafficking and exploitation, especially of underprivileged women, exist on a scale far, far, beyond the question of prostitution alone.