For people who are still being exploited in prostitution…negative effects of the [sex purchase] ban…must be viewed as positive from the perspective that the purpose of the law is…to combat prostitution. – “An Evaluation of the Ban Against the Purchase of Sexual Services” (AKA The Skarhed Report)
Today is the tenth annual International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, which as I explained in last year’s column for the event, is…
…intended to call attention to the violence committed against whores by sociopaths, bad customers and especially the police…violence which is largely engendered and enabled by criminalization and the marginalization which grows from it. In recent years, some of the worst and most widespread violence against us has sprung from sex trafficking hysteria; the propaganda which drives this moral panic paints all prostitutes as pathetic, childlike victims suffering from mental illnesses which render us unable to make decisions for ourselves, thus justifying our abduction, imprisonment, deportation, robbery and rape. And though the actual violence is most often perpetrated on us by men, many of the chief enablers of the outrage are women: namely, the neofeminist prohibitionists who use us as scapegoats onto which they can project their own sick fantasies of gender war.
Nowhere is this more evident than in “end demand” campaigns such as the Swedish model and “sting” operations predicated upon “trafficking” mythology. “End demand” tactics disguise their backers’ inherent misogyny by aggressively persecuting male customers instead, even to the point of misrepresenting arrested transgender hookers as “clients”. “End demand” and Swedish model proponents ignore both history and economics (despite the pretense that the approach is based in economic theory), and respond to copious evidence that the approach harms sex workers by denying it, insisting that the harm is actually good (see epigram), or simply dismissing it as a “price worth paying” for their fanatical dream of a society in which sex is entirely under government control. Whether their motivation is violent misandry, self-hatred, plain tyranny or even vengeance (the ex-husband of a certain ultra-wealthy “end demand” backer is known to have been a frequent client of expensive call girls), the result is the same: normal male sexuality is demonized, a natural and pragmatic female response to it is pathologized, and governments are given yet another excuse for crushing individual rights under a bloated police state.
The observance was originally established by Dr. Annie Sprinkle, Stacy Swimme, Michael Foley and the late Robyn Few as a memorial for the victims of Gary Ridgeway, but quickly grew into a time for remembering all sex workers victimized by the violence which is a direct and predictable result of any form of criminalization, including Swedish-style client criminalization. Until sex workers’ right to own and control our own bodies and make our own choices is recognized in the US, sex workers in many countries whose governments are bullied by American threats and bribed by American money will never be free from organized violence. Only rights can stop the wrongs, and those rights can only be achieved by official recognition of the fact that sex workers are not intrinsically different from other adults and that sex work is work.
A day to be extra ashamed of my nationality…
You should no more be ashamed of your nationality than I am of mine. When evil people take over a government, that says nothing about the good people suffering under their rule. I remember that when I was younger people would slam Russians, and I always reminded them that the Soviet government was not equal to the Russian people; unfortunately, people in every land are naive and easily tricked into submitting to the rule of monsters.
Ok, you are right, I guess I should not be ashamed of what my government does. Still, Sweden’s reputation bothers me. 🙁
Just as America’s reputation bothers me. I was very patriotic as a lass, and always have to keep in mind the quote from Edward Abbey, “A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”
The frustrating thing is … it’s very hard to see the ball moving down the field on this. It’s something that most, unfortunately, choose to ignore. I wish I knew what we could do to change that. 🙁
As a perverse irony, one study I remember suggests that Swedes support the Swedish model as a means of promoting gender equality. Fighting the policies that promote violence against sex workers entails popping some popular, if delusional, bubbles.
Oh, yeah. That narrative is as strong as ever here. Remember “könskriget” (Gender war)? That is unfortunately not *much* more extreme than many neofeminist pundits in media. And people buy it.
The title of this post is the obvious course of action, as the only way to end demand would be to do what some neofeminists in Sweden already have suggested (seriously!); mandatory use of “chemical castration” drugs for all adult males! (It was proposed as a method to stop domestic abuse.)
There will come a point that something has to give; neofeminism will never moderate itself, and more and more people will be victimized by it over time.
Some neofems attack their comrades that have sons, even if they had them before accepting the ideology.
Maggie, thanks for speaking out about Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. Many of us spend many days speaking about how we love our work, how its relatively safe, how we choose to do what we do, that we get a lot of satisfaction from our work. But one day a year we acknowledge the REAL victims of our horrible, bad, judgmental, sex negative system that keeps prostitutes down. Rather than respect and appreciate their valuable work spreading love and pleasure throughout the land. I’ll be at Center for Sex and Culture today. Everyone is invited there to join us to remember the victims of our anti whore culture. We will prevail! We will remain the world’s oldest and longest running profession.
You’re welcome, Annie; thank YOU (and all the others who have worked to establish the observance) for putting yourself out there and saying what needs to be said to people who would rather not hear it.
Suggestion:
Move this commemoration to another day. People are too busy preparing for the holiday to pay attention to things like this. Sorry, but it’s true.
Choose another day.
This day was chosen because it was the day that Gary Ridgway was finally sentenced and brought to justice for (most of) the crimes he committed.
And people are always “too busy” to pay attention to something.
What upsets me the most is that “end demand” activists insist clients are psychopathic monsters who think of sex-workers as disposable objects. Which I immediately find preposterous because sex makes me feel more protective and sensitive to the woman’s feelings. So it upsets me when neofeminists assume I am sadistic and think of sex-workers as “sperm toilets.”
It should be obvious to anyone that violence and sex-work are contingent relations. It is unimaginative to not conceive of a situation where a man paying a woman for sex is a benign transaction. This is why sex-work should be decriminalized. That way harm can be minimized and sex-workers will have legal recourse. To see an inherent relation between violence and sex-work requires a lack of critical thinking.
And gender equality? We removed women’s barriers to entry a long time ago.
You’ve hit the main point there, I think. “Clients” are defined exclusively as MEN by the trafficking and “end demand” crowds. This in spite of the fact that some women pay for sex with other women. Does this mean those women are “rapists” and there only to degrade the whores they see? Ask anyone in the trafficking crowd and they’d have hard time saying anything but “no” to that question because their definitions of “rape” always include a dick in the mix.
It’s this kind of craziness that should be brutally obvious – and I don’t know why any man would go along with painting the entire race of males as “evil rapists”. When my wife is RIGHT about something – I suck up to her and prostrate myself. When she’s WRONG – I don’t kiss up to her but I do ask her … “Are you fuckin’ high?”
These people are fuckin’ high.
Exactly. I think you touch the surface on why they are so high. My personal opinion is that the problem stems from radical feminism. As Maggie correctly points out, it is spawned from Marxism. Marxist feminists perceived prostitution as a consequence of capitalism, but radical feminists decided there was another class system. They called it patriarchy. From this perspective, women are a slave class of sexual commodities and servants. Under this lens, you can see why they oppose pornography, prostitution, “objectification,” marriage, sexual harassment and gender roles etc. But while they see all women as commodities in patriarchy, they’ve got a madonna/whore dichotomy going where patriarchy turns prostitutes in to disposable second-class women.
When confronted with examples like you gave, the intellectual radical feminist reply is that they are exceptions that prove the rule. As Sheila Jeffreys put it, prostitution means men have a right to sex. This is why radical feminists ignore sex-worker rights activists. They see them as either secret PR agents of the sex-industry or rare exceptions.
It’s bollocks of course, Marxism is the drug feeding their black/white delusions. But since they can get away with adhominem attacks, I think it’s only fair we get to call them commies.
thanks for all the great comments. I do think that somday the neofims will go just to far and the end of man hate will begin.
>”What upsets me the most is that “end demand” activists insist clients are psychopathic monsters who think of sex-workers as disposable objects.”
Most clients, like most men, are nothing like that. It’s maybe 1% who are. But you only need one.
Now cops, they are a constant problem. I’d take my chances with a psycho over a cop any time.
Hi Maggie,
Great post. I’ve selected you for the 2012 Blog of the Year Award. You can check out the details here: http://bridgesareforburning.wordpress.com/2012blogoftheyearaward
I don’t usually mention International Days of X because I usually find they are for causes that everyone is supporting anyway. This is one of the few I mention because the cause is just IGNORED by everyone. No matter what your views on sex work, violence against any group of people is unacceptable. I think a lot of people ignore it or joke about it because they figure it’s what sex workers deserve. They *want* the industry to be dangerous so women will leave it.
Exactly, which is why most women opposed to prostitution are deaf to the arguments that criminilizing prostitution actually makes things more dangerous for the women they are trying to save. In another column, Maggie has written that a necessary safety valve that enables men to cheat safely. I don’t think most women can get past the fact that prostitution enables men to cheat, period. They won’t listen to arguments that men are hard-wired for sexual variety, and 60-80% of men will have some sort of extramarital sex at least once in their lifetimes. Some are even opposed to pornography because they see no difference between their husband or boyfriend masturbating to a computer image or magazine, and hiring an escort.
They *want* the industry to be dangerous so women will leave it.
Absolutely, and in addition to their hostility to sex workers, the fundamentalists and neofeminists prefer millions of women to die unnecessarily than support the HPV vaccine, one of the safest vaccines ever made. Such is the fanaticism of the anti-sex devotees.
@gumdeo
Have you seen any evidence of neofeminists UNCONNECTED to Christian fundamentalism opposing this vaccine?
What do you specifically mean by “unconnected” in this instance?
Because Christian fundamentalists and neofeminists disagree vehemently on abortion, because for the fundamentalists, sex is the problem. Neofeminists can see themselves having sex with a man before, during, and after marriage—and needing an abortion as a result. For the same reason, neofeminists probably support the HPV vaccine because they can see themselves or their daughters having the type of sex that leads to the disease this vaccine would prevent.
However, pornography and prostitution help men cheat on them, and most women can’t get around that. That, I believe, is the real reason most women oppose prostitution. But just because a woman opposes prostitution which expands the sexual freedom of others doesn’t mean she would not want greater sexual freedom for herself or her daughters. That’s why I say that a woman publicly opposing the HPV vaccine is more likely to be a Christian fundamentalist then a neofeminist who has no connection to them except the belief that pornography and prostitution should be outlawed.
Neofeminists typically say that the HPV vaccine is unnecessary, a moneymaking scheme and that it gives girls license to engage in promiscuity, a position similar to that of the fundamentalists. Moreover, heterosex is not desirable; so they often do not see themselves having sex with a man at all. Apart from PIV being a health danger, it is also said to be trauma, rape, and a political problem – it can emotionally bond women to men, thus turning them into “slaves” (which is the same thing certain MRAs say, just flipped 180 degrees).
Now, the fundamentalists and neofeminists do agree on pornography and prostitution, but also on other matters. In “Right Wing Women”, Andrea Dworkin lauds the more religious females – how wise and smart they are – while implying that liberal women are empty-headed morons. Certainly she agreed with the right-wingers in much of their critique of the liberals and leftists. Janice Raymond, in “A Passion For Friends” praises a historic order of nuns known as the Beguines that began in the 13th century and was widespread for several centuries.
Aspects of the fundamentalist worldview obviously do have a profound resonance with neofeminists; the most important of which is the authoritarian mindset. If you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, then the only question is which eggs are going to be broken.
When’s the last time you heard of the police roughing up the tobacco industry? Or the local liquor store? But hookers? They’re in more danger from the police than from the serial killers (except when they’re the same person).
And of course, if you’re not a cop and you’re looking to beat, rob, rape or kill somebody, it sure helps if it’s somebody who can’t call the cops.
Yes, decriminalize. Legalize; it would be better than what we do now.
[…] I’ve explained before, there are three major days observed by sex worker rights activists: the Day To End Violence Against Sex Workers (December 17th, the anniversary of the 2003 sentencing of the Green River Killer); Sex Worker […]