Originally a comment by Josh Spokes on “We hope discussions on trafficking would not disproportionately focus on sex work”.
The reversal of meaning that’s happened to the word “stigmatizing” in this context is disturbing. I think it’s worth unpacking. I also think well-meaning people are accepting a perverse use of the term because it’s become de rigeur. Please reconsider.
“Stigmatizing sex workers” in a harmful way has always been understood to include things like:
- calling women whores and streetwalkers
- jeering at prostitutes
- treating them as unrapeable
- Trying to sweep them away like untidy garbage (you know, like how we do the homeless)
I think most of you would agree that this is a sensible, ordinary use of the term.
But look at how it’s being used here, by contrast:
- Advocating for an end to the conditions that force women into prostitution
- Calling the sex trade what it clearly is: Exploitative, and almost always paid rape. (Notice the “almost always” before you comment, anyone, because I won’t be nice if you gloss over it for a chance to ‘correct’ me)
- Urging other liberals not to ignore the rape and exploitation of the vast majority of women in prostitution. Urging them not to sweep it under the rug because some more well to do Western women had a lark doing lap dances for money in a choosy-choice way
Does anyone still think that this is a reasonable way to frame “stigmatization” of prostitutes? Does anyone else notice that linguistic legerdemain, and how insidious it is?
I hope some people will contemplate this and change their minds.
Comments
24 responses to “Guest post: Does anyone else notice that linguistic legerdemain?”
Have you not received the memo yet, Josh? Dictionary definitions are just so passe nowadays. Words mean whatever the speaker wants them to mean and the rest of us just have to STFU and accept their bullshit.
Well, that’s what I’ve read on certain other blogs that shall remain nameless.
Ah yes, the Humpty Dumpty theory of meaning.
And so sayeth the Horde.
Amen!
I agree. We need to get back to the old-fashioned kind of stigmatizing. But…it’s harder than it used to be. If you just call them whores and jeer at them, people may call you on it.
So first, we’re not going to speak in our own voice. We’ll make it a framed narrative. Let’s see…we’ve got: the word “stigmatizing”…being used to mean…(unnamed persons)…urging other liberals…not to sweep it under the rug…because… Frames in frames in frames…we make Douglas Hofstadter proud. They’ll never figure out who’s really speaking here.
Now that we’ve distanced ourselves from our own words, we bring out the knives. …some more well to do (sneer) Western (bad) women (need I say more?) had a lark (and it was frivolous!) doing lap dances (more frivolity! not real prostitution! No one got fucked! Just some lap dances!) for money (how dare they!) in a choosy-choice way (breezily dismissing their agency).
The choosy-choice bit is the piece de resistance. It seems to apply only to the women who choosy-choice to prostitute themselves, but that’s an illusion. Of necessity, it applies to all women: those who choosy-choice to prostitute themselves and those who choosy-choice not to. Competence attaches to the agent, not the outcome. If women aren’t competent to decide one way for themselves, then they aren’t competent to decide the other way, either.
Does Josh really mean all this the way it sounds? Hell if I know. I genuinely can’t decode the frames.
@Steven
Was that a deliberate strawman, Steven? Because if not, you must not have read the same post I did.
You ignored the meat of Josh’s post in order to focus on words that were obviously intended to mock, not sex workers, but the reasoning of the activists who point to the small minority of safe, well-paid sex workers in order to insist that sex work is just another job and anyone who thinks otherwise is stigmatizing the workers.
While writing the above, it occurred to me that maybe what choice feminists are really concerned with is that the work itself not be stigmatized. Perhaps they think that the workers are stigmatized because the work is?
Am I on to something, or just confused? I can’t tell.
@ 6 Lady Mondegreen
Gee, I wonder what would ever give them that idea?
@Silentbob, Yeah, I phrased that all wrong. Of course the work is stigmatized–traditionally it’s a moral stigma, based in the double standard, religious prohibitions against sex outside marriage, etc. But I guess what I’m fumbling around is this: do they think we should not describe the work itself as unpleasant or the result (for most of its practitioners) of coercion because that contributes to the stigma attached to prostitution?
Because I just don’t get why someone saying “I think the reality is that the work is mostly degrading” gets told they are contributing to the stigmatization of women who do sex work.
@ 8 Lady Mondegreen
I hesitate to comment on this topic at all, because it is likely, as a man, that I will be dismissed as having a vested interest in promulgating the sex class or something like that. So if you’ll pardon my cowardice, I’ll defer to a woman who is also a sex worker:
(Source: maggiemcneill.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/amazingly-stupid-statements/)
Now that I’ve shot whatever B&W cred I may have had ;-) , I might as well go the whole hog (@5):
You write as thought these are two distinct groups. They’re not. Of course. The core of activists advocating for destigmatization/decriminalization of sex work are, unsurprisingly, (current or former) sex workers themselves.
Silentbob: uh-huh. Prostitution reinforces the idea that women are for sex purposes. That is bad. This isn’t complicated.
@Cressida
I find that stated too simplistic. You could just as well state that nannies reinforce the idea the woman are for child care purposes.
So yes I find it more complicated. I find it difficult to on the one hand treat sexual exploitation as worse than the rest, without turning sex into something sacred that may then be a cause to stigmatize sex-workers.
But I do understand Jos’ point and I think his point of paid rape very apt. It reminds me of the trial of Dominique Strauss-Kahn in France. Where the testimony of the prostitutes made it very clear that they were paid to wave their consent. The customer paid and they no longer had any say in what was acceptable to them and what was not. They just had to comply with his wishes.
Steven, I honestly don’t understand how you got that out of my post. Do you really, honestly and truly, believe I was advocating for a return to old-fashioned mockery of “whores”?
This isn’t complicated. There’s no real need to ask “why” sex is treated differently in this context than other jobs. It’s not unclear.
Silentbob and others: Honest question, are you truly wondering about this, or are you deliberately obscuring the context? That context being that we live in a patriarchy, and the transaction is not one of two equals in a business relationship because patriarchy conflates sex with ownership of women’s bodies?
Are you truly offering up that you see no difference—-no context that informs this specific transaction—-between the buying of women’s bodies by men and the everpresent threat of violence, and say, working at a restaurant?
That, Silentbob, was not an honest move. Don’t say you hesitate to comment. You don’t. You never have. Neither have I.
And don’t dress it up with that dishonest, “So I’ll defer to a woman who is a sex worker.” Say what you want to say and stand behind it.
And don’t think people don’t notice that you ventriloquized through the words of a woman who says things about the sex trade that you agree with. Come on man, be fair.
#11 Axxyaan:
Uh, yeah. They do, because nannies are overwhelmingly female. Same with prostituted women. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Way to make my point for me.
@Silentbob
Emphasis added.
Nobody here has any anger or bile against sex workers. Nobody here wants to criminalize them.
I have no idea who Maggie McNeill was addressing, but the words of hers you quoted are irrelevant to this discussion. If she was addressing people who “get all of [their] moral answers from a 2000+ year old book,” she wasn’t addressing anyone here. If she was addressing feminists who support the Nordic model generally, she was mistaken about their positions and their goals.
Some of them are. Some of them are, unsurprisingly, current or former sex traffickers and industry advocates.
Be that as it may, Josh wasn’t smearing or dismissing sex workers as such.
Also, this “So if you’ll pardon my cowardice, I’ll defer to a woman who is also a sex worker” dig is annoying, because it implies that people who favor the Nordic model ignore the views of sex workers, which of course is absurd. Many sex workers favor the Nordic model.
A single data point.
http://www.marketplace.org/2016/03/02/health-care/health-care-takes-fight-against-trafficking
Some people mentioned the Nordic model. In the context of the discussion about stigmatizing and reversals of meaning, I find the following words from the Swedish government report quite inspiring.
Then we have a fragment describing positive attitudes of those who have left prostitution to the criminalization of the buyers. After this, we read:
What do you make of it? I read it as a quite straightforward approval of the feeling of increased stigmatization. See, for the government people it’s just *excellent* that the sex workers feel more stigmatized. According to them, that’s exactly how the Nordic model is supposed to work. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. That’s the desired effect.
Always listen to your government, I say. It’s a source of wisdom. “Unpacking reversals of meaning”? Phew. No matter how you try, there will always be a government to pack them back.
Another data point:
http://www.nätverketpris.se/start-english.html
A Swedish group for current and former sex workers only. They support the “Nordic model” laws.
So far I haven’t found anything else by or about them via Google. I have no idea how big their organization is, or how representative.
From the website I linked to at #20, the “Goals” section:
From their FAQ:
@Cressida #15
I didn’t make your point for you. I see nobody wanting to focus on nannies that are exploited. So people see no problem treating those differently althought your arguments works on both. So that argument can’t explain/support that difference.
@Josh Spokes #13
Yes Josh I am truly wondering about this. Because when I argue about this, the only way I can argue against sex work being ordinary work, is to skecth two similar situations one which involves sex-work and one which involves other work and hoping the other agrees that in this situation the sex work situation is unacceptable and the other situation is acceptable.
But once I try to ground this conclusions with arguments, I find my arguments can’t make such a distinction without making sex somehow special. And once you make sex special, I don’t see how you can avoid people from saying it is wrong to accept money for something (so) special.
That’s the difficulty right there. It seems to me that you’re trying to find a universal, always-applicable rule that doesn’t change because of political context. Why? That’s not necessary. The fact is that sex is special in the world and context in which we live, and that context includes prostitution of women by men with more power than them.
I think (correct me if I’m wrong) that you believe that you can’t make a legitimate argument against prostitution unless you find a Kantian moral imperative that stands up in all situations. You don’t. That’s not a requirement you have to meet in order to make an honest argument about why prostitution and the kind of sex involved in it is, in actual fact very different from more mundane work pressures.
No, selling sex is not the same as selling hamburgers. That’s not because sex is Shameful And Dirty. It’s because “sex,” in this context, is overwhelmingly about coercion, force, and the degradation of women at the hands of men. That’s what makes the difference.
Yes, we can imagine a world that developed differently. A world where sex isn’t freighted with the same power dynamics and patriarchal abuse that this world has. In that world, yes, we can imagine that selling sex might not be any different in actual practice and effect from selling hamburgers.
But that world isn’t real. Noticing that we live in a darker world than that, and therefore the sex transaction is different no matter how much we don’t like that it’s different, is not a moral wrong. It’s not an intellectual failure.
You are not epistemologically or morally obligated to “normalize” sex against things that aren’t like sex in order to say, “This is why prostitution, on balance in the world we live in, is overwhelmingly about exploiting women.”
Why? You ask. Because knowing what the political context is now, doesn’t tell me wether I should defend this political context or fight it and in which direction. If sex is special, why shouldn’t I conclude from that, that you shouldn’t offer it for money? The political context was once and still greatly is that the bond between man en woman is special. Yet we fight this and want mariage to be open to other kind of couples. So knowing the current political context, doesn’t tell me what political context to aim for.
You write that prostitution is overwhelmingly about exploiting women and I agree. However labor has been overwhelmingly about exploiting the poor and/or lower class people. Yet we didn’t find it necessary to fight labor in order to fight the exploitation of it. So why do I see so much argument in favor of fighting prostitution itself instead of just fighting the exploitation? And yes my impression is that this fighting of prostitution is often enought the principle goal and not the practical means of fighting the exploitation. The speed with which one argues from prostitution is often enought exploitation to therefore prostitution should be illegal (or variations), with arguments that one wouldn’t accept if prostitution was substituted with something else makes IMO this kind of conclusions suspect.
I can understand if one would try to argue that the practical circumstance revolving labor and prostitution are different enough so that as a temporary practical solution we should consider making something illegal with regards to prostitution while we don’t consider similar prohibitions with regard to labor. But those are generally not the kind of arguements I hear.