The men who leave detailed reviews on Punternet
Sarah Ditum in the Independent says how Dennis Parsons got it wrong:
Lewis Pierre, who killed Daria Pionko in Leeds last year, did not do so as a result of extended immersion into radical feminism. In fact, he killed her next to a “managed zone” where all laws governing prostitution were suspended. If the allegedly protective message “sex work is work” could percolate anywhere, surely it would be there. Or think about the men who leave detailed reviews on Punternet addressing women’s teeth, breasts, ability to submit to unwanted penetration while feigning delight and skill in suppressing their gag reflex: these cruel appraisals derive from the same entitlement and dehumanisation that enables these men to buy out women’s consent in the first place.
Without stigma, there could be no prostitution. Before you can pay to have sex with someone, you have to believe that there’s a kind of person it’s OK to pay to have sex with: someone whose desire to have sex with you is an irrelevance to be purchased away, someone whose pleasure in sex is immaterial so long as they can perform whatever gets the purchaser going. Prostitution isn’t work, it’s abuse, which is why the sex trade needs trafficking, pimping and poverty to supply enough ready bodies to service demand. It’s time to take all the stigma that Parsons identified and direct it at those who drive the vicious market in penetration: it’s the punters who deserve it.
Another good place to direct stigma is at the foundational idea that women are the class who are required to be sexually / aesthetically pleasing to the other class, men, and that they therefore are subject to strict evaluation and grading on those criteria at all times, and to punishment ranging from anger and contempt to violence and death for scoring badly.
Very this indeed. I made a similar point with a (now possibly former) friend a couple of weeks ago. The idea that if a person is ‘willing’ to take abuse, then it’s totally OK to abuse that person is an evil idea. I find that people like to zoom in on personal issues when they’re arguing that some prostitutes like being prostitutes but then zoom all the way out when questions of ethics come around. Market forces… prostitutes wouldn’t exist if there weren’t a societal need for them…. blah blah fucking blah.
Let’s keep it at a personal level: a particular prostitute is very probably a prostitute because she needs to be. She very probably wouldn’t be if she didn’t have a choice. A punter has enough spare money to make the prostitute’s life a little bit better or a little bit worse. What to do….. what to do….? It shouldn’t be a choice. The punter should know he’s doing the wrong thing when he could just as easily have done the right thing. The stigma needs to be taken away from the abused person and placed on the abuser where it belongs. It seems as though that ought to be a fairly easy thing to achieve…. but… well, here we are.
*WARNING: tedious security-based analysis to follow* (I’ve finally learned that this warning is necessary)
There are some fairly serious operational security issues with the Nordic Model. A sensible prostitute would make a note of the john’s car number plate, for example, and tell friends where they were likely to be and for how long. Unfortunately, that sensible prostitute probably wouldn’t get much repeat business. The pressure to offer ‘discreet’ services would take over, I reckon.
Decriminalising prostitutes and criminalising johns is essential, I think, but there’s an inherent danger that prostitutes are the ones who will have to take the risks for the john’s desire not to be caught. This could certainly lead to prostitutes having to make some very bad and dangerous decisions. But decriminalising prostitution is the only possible way out of that trap. If there are networks of prostitutes looking out for each other, insisting on codes of practice that increase safety, sharing information about johns, their whereabouts, worries and concerns, then perhaps they won’t have to put themselves in quite so much danger. That can only happen if being a prostitute isn’t illegal and being a punter is.
Being me, I’m already playing around with some code that could be used to build a social network of prostitutes sharing data that will help them to be safer but even as I do it I know it won’t work.
I’m unreservedly in favour of the Nordic Model but it is far from perfect. We need that transference of stigma too. Is it *really* that hard, society?