The enemy of my enemy is my friend. – Sanskrit proverb
So a couple of weeks ago, this item hit the internet:
…The sex industry should be fully decriminalised, the Westminster based Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) said in a new report. The IEA argues that existing attempts to restrict prostitution are “ineffective, ill-informed and a waste public money”…The…report says rules that criminalise sellers directly, or criminalise third parties who supply them with services, simply push the sex industry underground, increasing the risks for sex workers. “The very concept of prostitution is no longer workable in today’s fluid sexual markets, where anyone can meet anyone, on whatever terms they choose,” said report author Catherine Hakim. “Decriminalisation is the only workable way forward. The proposal to copy Sweden and criminalise customers in the sex trade is a complete waste of public money, unforgiveable in a time of austerity”…
One would think this news would’ve been welcomed by activists; every additional voice calling for decriminalization not only adds to the chorus, but also increases the chance that any given politician will be in direct contact with one of those voices. But was that what happened? Nope. Instead, I saw numerous voices declaring that the cause of sex worker rights “doesn’t need” this support because the IEA endorsed decriminalization for the “wrong reasons”. You know, kind of like prostitution is criminalized because it’s sex for the “wrong reasons”. But it wasn’t just one “wrong reason”; oh, no! As I’ve explained before, neofeminists do not like Catherine Hakim, because she says things like this:
The report by the social scientist Catherine Hakim says that international surveys have demonstrated a large gap in sexual desire between men and women which “cannot be dismissed as an outdated patriarchal myth as argued by some feminists”. Dr Hakim says the “sexual deficit” between men and women “helps to explain many puzzles, including why men are the principal customers for commercial sexual entertainments of all kinds…male demand for sexual entertainments…is…growing, and ineradicable”, she concludes. She says the available evidence suggests that prostitution and pornography have no damaging social impact and may even help reduce sex crime. Dr Hakim says: “Spain, where prostitution is legal, also has exceptionally low rates of rape”…
These statements should not be controversial to any whore, yet for some people common sense and personal experience are always trumped by “feminist” dogma, despite the fact that most people who adopt that self-identifier are our implacable enemies.
Sex worker activists who care more about “feminist” nonsense than about our cause, or who think that we have the luxury of working only with would-be allies who can pass some sort of ideological purity test, need to get the hell out of sex worker rights activism; they are sleeping with the enemy and cannot be trusted to do what is necessary to advance our struggle. This is a war, not a game; our enemies use tactics specifically intended to expose us to police violence and starve us to death if we manage to escape that. They are perfectly willing to make whatever alliances are necessary to advance their cause, and to employ doomsday weapons that cause widespread collateral damage, yet some of the people on our side still treat this as a jolly game in which the identity of one’s playmates is far more important than the outcome. If that’s the way you feel, please go home and find another cause; we need allies who will actually help us, not cliquish schoolgirls who want to turn down three-quarters of our potential allies because they’re boys, have cooties, wear unfashionable clothes or live in the wrong part of town. Anyone who is willing to watch the bodies of her sisters continue to pile up because she’s too prissy to sit down at a table with people whose philosophies differ from hers is helping the prohibitionists, and that makes her a liability at best and an enemy at worst. But anyone who speaks up for the decriminalization of sex work is the enemy of prohibitionists, and that makes her my friend and ally.
Err, Maggie, isn’t this doing precisely what you’re accusing them of doing?
I actually thought about that, and the answer is no because what they’re doing is counterproductive. They’re refusing people who want to help push the bus out of the mud; I’m asking people who are just sitting on the bus to get the hell off and help push.
The problem with consequentialist moral equations such as notions of ‘counterproductivity’ is they depend on where you draw your horizon.
Some might suggest that by furthering the agenda of neo-liberal think-tanks you might gain some short term gains at the expense of greater long term economic stratification and social atomisation that are likely to empower authoritarian elites who are most unlikely to have the welfare of sex workers at heart.
What you’ve got to do is what you feel is right, from the perspective you currently occupy. Not accept ideological dicta or strategy dictated by experts in the hope you can somehow transcend your own moral capacity. If you feel getting into bed with the IEA is selling your soul, it probably is.
I’m a pragmatist. Right now I’m a lot more worried about women being raped by cops, caged & “re-educated” by “rescuers” & murdered by psychos.
And a neo-liberal society in which the few are able to enrich themselves without limit at the expense of the many is pretty sure to lead to even more cops with even less accountability (to anyone except their masters in the one percent). After all, private property is the only thing sacred enough to justify state protection and the more desperate those without it become the more ‘rigorous’ (or pigorous) that protection must be.
I agree with Maggie. She is rejecting those who put ideology above facts and this is not the same as the reciprocal.
Decriminalization, by any means, results in better safety and rights for workers, even the ones that are coerced. This is supported by research and not just ideology. Abolitionists might recognize these facts, but will say that prostitution has to be eradicated completely, and that harm reduction strategies are counter-productive for that.
However, support for criminal laws should be based on fact and not some ideology. A criminal law that causes harm in exchange for the hope of some hypothetical social improvement is unconstitutional.
Pretending you can predict outcomes from complex social interactions – including when I do it – is always ideological. Real life is more complex than rationalisation.
So you need to go with what you feel is right rather than kowtowing to the dicta of ideologues and moralists.
Frankly, if the IEA had my back I wouldn’t know which direction to expect the knife from.
In general, I agree with facts and empiricism above ideology. But think of Victorian ideas; “the poor are always with us” and “laissez faire” as the best way to run the country. It took an ideology, that poverty wasn’t “natural”, and that there were other ways to run an economy to change things, to attempt improvement.
There may be ‘facts’ when it comes to estimating the rate of acceleration of a falling body or the elasticity of an iron bar but social and economic ‘facts’ are post hoc at best and rarely even that. Predictions for complex systems are always based on ideology and just about anything involving human interaction is complex. That’s one reason real-world utilitarianism is always morally and intellectually bankrupt. You can’t really even predict whether plummeting fat men will derail a box car.
I disagree. With a good physical simulation and careful modeling of the starting conditions you can predict “whether plummeting fat men will derail a box car”, or rather you can determine the expected probability distribution. My estimate would be that this is a demanding multi-year Ph.D. project, but it is surely doable. Of course you may find out that the outcome is highly sensitive to minor variations in the starting conditions in some areas (which is often called “chaotic”), but that also is a valid prediction for those areas. Any competently done simulation will go after mean and variance (and possibly other result parameters) that can describe such a situation. And in the more extreme ranges, you can make pretty accurate predictions directly: One “plummeting fat man” will, with high probability, not derail a boxcar, but 10’000 very likely will if the boxcar goes fast enough (i.e. can be derailed in the first place).
Social sciences done right (which admittedly few of its practitioners can do, but that is a problem if its practitioners, not of the science itself) can deliver good predictions in some cases, and can determine when such predictions are not possible for others. Of course, some approaches in wide adoption, like the “Homo Oeconomicus” are nice for doing theoretical work, but bear little resemblance to the behavior of actual human beings and hence typically fail to produce good predictions for human behavior. However, even that model has its uses when modeling situations where algorithms and not humans are the actors.
We’d disagree as to whether it would ever be practically possible to take into account enough variables to make such a prediction, but that’s by the by.
You are aware of the famous hypothetical I refer to I presume. It doesn’t really allow for a Ph.D. study.
I was not aware of that one (or rather not in that form). Interesting. It is a bit of a different scenario though.
The Sanskrit version (probably not original) was attributed to Chanakya – often referred to as ‘the Indian Machiavelli’. He proposed that the kingdoms surrounding ones own were natural enemies while the ones surrounding those were friends, with the next concentric circle being enemies and so on. But he also pointed out that when the immediate enemies were vanquished the alliances would reverse as now the next circle would become the inner circle, etc. It’s hard to imagine even Machiavelli promoting that level of cynicism.
And of course this doctrine was invoked pretty frequently in the form of “Yes, he’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard” by the US government (originally FDR re Stalin?) to justify supporting some of the worst human rights abusers on the planet. These days we call the inevitable result of that kind of diplomacy “blowback”.
cabrogal on August 21, 2015 at 6:02 am:
That would be the Arthashastra.
Both the Arthashastra and The Prince were advice or principles for establishing a ruler, not for establishing a rule. The struggle here is about establishing (or repealing) a rule(s) or law(s), not about establishing a ruler. I think that is a worthwhile distinction to make.
For example: to establish the rule or law of racial equality in the USA (however imperfect that rule may be honored even today), civil rights leaders did not turn down support from either the political left (from socialists to the Democratic Party) or from the political right (Earl Warren was a Republican, appointed by a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower).
Have the results of either broad political persuasion exercising power led to perfect results in all areas of American government since the civil rights movements of the 20th century? I don’t think so.
But most would acknowledge that being rid of de jure racial segregation was a good thing, and worth the politically disparate alliances required to bring it about.
In most areas of fundamental reform of laws, such alliances among those who are enemies on other fronts are necessary.
I know we’re well into the territory of ‘what if’ here but I think you could make a strong argument that allowing political parties to link their names to the civil rights movement contributed little, if anything, to its cause but ensured it would remain party politicised and polarising for generations to come.
Political parties don’t facilitate change. They jump on bandwagons if they think they’ve already got enough support to be perceived as winning ones.
I’m not sure I understand their objection to IEA. If they are economics expert, then of course they give opinion that involve economic arguments. They do not have the expertise to talk about other aspects. And it is a good argument by any standard: the economic cost for something useless will convince the general population and politicians more easily than arcane debates about personnal freedom and women’s agency. And the argument that prostitution is now a meaningless concept is an excellent argument against legal prohibition.
Your new ‘friend’ and you are united against a common enemy. But this new ‘friend’ may have hidden, ulterior motives. Think of Josef Stalin, FDR in the US and Churchill in the UK; all united against Adolf; for the UK is was self-preservation, for Uncle Joe it was territorial advantage.
Caveat emptor.
IEA come to decriminalization via an economics perspective, Amnesty via human rights and Lancet via a medical harm reduction perspective. I don’t think we want to quibble about somebodies routing as long as they end up at the right destination-supporting decriminalization. The more voices and perspectives supporting decriminalization the more likely for one of them to pierce the blindness of the general public. And we seem to be getting more and more voices lately which can’t but help. The only perspective that should be addressed in at all a negative way, but gently, are those who don’t understand the difference between decriminalization and legalization. They may be on the right track but just require a subtle nudge
Both Lancet and Amnesty arrived at their position by putting humans at the forefront.
The IEA don’t just use ‘economics’ (as if that were some kind of value-free science). They use a particular perspective upon economics which is dictated by their corporate sponsors. The same sponsors, BTW, who control the political process via campaign funding and could decriminalise sex work within a single electoral cycle should they so choose.
I don’t think that the IEA, Amnesty and the Lancet have ulterior motives; I was just thinking more generally about faux friends.
That is why in these cases you do careful fact-checking and checking of the reasoning offered. Where available, a historical or cultural analog may also provide insights. With a bit of perception, you can usually spot whether the work is rigorous (i.e. is based on sound facts, looks at all alternatives or explicitly sets some out-of-scope, argues cleanly without “hand waving” and clearly states the limits of the chosen approach) or a crafted construct of smoke and mirrors intended to sway the reader in a specific direction.
While I do not know about the IEA, I agree on Hakim, Amnesty and the Lancet likely not having hidden (!) ulterior motives here.
Do I detect some obfuscation, disguised as intellectualism, going on here?
Let’s put things in simple terms. If the objective is to decriminalize paid sex work, and one group or another (in this case, IEA, and recently Amnesty International), favor decriminalization for whatever reasons they reach that conclusion, then I say, the more the merrier.
I don’t have to agree with a group’s entire agenda to agree with them on this point. And given the general prohibitionist environment and hysteria on this subject, I think it shows a certain courage (not to mention acceding to the facts, whether of an economic or human rights or harm reduction or whatever origin) on the part of that group. So hurrah for them.
Sure, different groups may have their own agendas — isn’t that why they exist in the first place? — but it is the objective to defeat the common enemy that is what brings them together. It’s a kind of truism that Stalin and Churchill and Roosevelt had their own agendas (to use an argument raised in this discussion), but the common objective was to defeat Hitler. Seems they were pretty successful at that, but might not have been if they put their differences above that common objective. There’s always time for dealing with the differences later, after the war has been won.
I come down solidly on the side of Maggie’s perspective on this one.
Yet the hot war was followed by 40+ years of cold war, when the west and Stalin and his successors weren’t aligned. Didn’t the west support the Taliban when they were fighting the Ruskies in Afghanistan, only for the Taliban to become the “bad boys”, and “our enemy”? Different agendas; beware when the fight is won how they could diverge.
I think it is naive to believe that once decriminalization in any given jurisdiction is achieved that will be the end of the debate or the battle. But it is a poor analogy to compare the global politics of a world war or the cold war that followed it, or the more recent history of an Afghanistan, to the effort waged to decriminalize sex work.
For one thing, the decriminalization battle is fought jurisdiction by jurisdiction, and a victory in one does not translate to a victory in another. For another, achieving decriminalization in any given jurisdiction establishes a new benchmark against which the opponents would have to organize and fight to have it overturned or replaced. And a legal achievement stands independent of any ideological or moralistic beliefs of its proponents or antagonists. The fact remains, the more and broader support one can muster in support of decriminalization, the better its chances both of its initial success and its longevity in any given jurisdiction.
I’m reluctant to continue with the analogy of WWII and the cold war for reasons stated, but one can say that it proves the old adage “this, too, shall pass.” While it may have taken 40-some years (a mere blink in the historical scheme of things), eventually Western ideas and democracy triumphed. We can only hope that decriminalization of sex work takes a lot less than four decades to achieve vindication wherever it is we live, but infighting among people who share that goal can only prolong the length of the struggle and put its success in jeopardy.
Really?
So you think the longevity and propagation of decriminalisation would be enhanced if NAMBLA came on board too? Or the Mafia?
I think you’re overintellectualisation now, by focusing on refuting a metaphor and missing the main point. I don’t think anyone is proposing fighting the IEA in the name of decriminalisation. It’s just a matter of who you want at your side at the barricades. I’ve got a bit of activism history behind me (and I don’t mean the faux internet variety) and I can tell you that inviting those with an overarching political agenda independent of your aims (e.g. Trotskyist groups) into your camp is a recipe for infighting and can alienate far more potential allies than you gain.
Yeah, well so do I have an activist history. And as distasteful as groups like the Weathermen and the more violent of the anti-war activists were to me, it took all types and groups to build the national pressure necessary to bring the Vietnam War to a conclusion. Even as I thought (and think) that violent acts should be prosecuted, I was happy to see the war ended.
I don’t see NAMBLA or the Mafia climbing on-board the decriminalization train (especially the latter who benefit from criminalization of all sorts of things, including sex work), and I think it’s a red herring to compare, even by inference, such groups with IEA or AI. But one can make all sorts of red herring arguments (what about the KKK, or ISIS? What about North Korea?) if the intent is to be argumentative for its own sake.
Oops. I should have read your comment before adding mine korhomme.
Sure. And now compare with some realistic scenarios for an alternate history where Nazi-Germany was not defeated. Alliances between entities that are not well-aligned of course do not solve all problems between them, but they can work for specific ones.
And there was a common agenda between the Taliban and the US State Department to defeat the Najibullah government in Afghanistan and kick the Russians out – which succeeded. Was that also a well considered alliance?
The short answer is, yes. It achieved its objective. What would you propose instead? Leaving the Soviets in Afghanistan?
That things were allowed to verge out of control in the decades after the Soviet withdrawal through what amounted to diplomatic neglect is a separate question.
if you can’t accept that alliances of convenience can achieve their objectives (and arguably it was more the CIA than the State Department that engineered the alliance of which you speak, but that’s not salient to the instant argument, so never mind) then you can’t accept that such an alliance is probably what it will take to decriminalize sex work in the U.S. and various other countries around the world, and you might as well just accept the status quo.
Absolutely.
Or more accurately, leave the locals to own and resolve the problem themselves rather than giving support to factions with a medievalist agenda. It’s not as if evicting the Red Army has given the country peace, prosperity or sovereignty. Any more than Soviet and Chinese support for evicting US invaders from Vietnam brought enlightened government to that country.
This is likely to be my final response to this line of argument since I think it has little to do with the current move to decriminalize sex work or the point Maggie was making in her post.
If you think support of “factions with a medievalist agenda” is in any way relevant to the instant discussion (especially when it is those with recidivist agendas who would keep sex work criminalized), then you are welcome to that view. But I think arguments like this simply encourage bloviation that hijacks the point of the thread without adding anything of any real practical value to the discussion.
I continue to come down solidly on Maggie’s side on this argument, and with that said, I think I’ll shut up now rather than risk further hijacking of the thread or the point.
The point is that sex workers themselves should be the primary owners of the struggle and it’s not valid to try to sideline some of them because they refuse to embrace supposed allies they find repugnant.
Sex workers are the primary movers behind the struggle. But sex workers do not make the laws, nor do they have the numbers or political clout to have much influence on the laws that criminalize and marginalize them. Neither are they the only ones discriminated against or penalized by criminalization.
Using your own argument, it also is not valid to sideline those who would advocate working to embrace alliances that promote the cause of decriminalization. It will take those alliances and groups with much greater influence and bigger voices to achieve the goal of decriminalization. Just as blacks and other minorities would not have achieved their ends without the cooperation and support of majorities and alliances of strange bedfellows, neither will sex workers — or the rest of us who support the cause for whatever reason — achieve the goal of decriminalization.
It seems to be you who is again dragging the argument away from the point, but nonetheless I will follow.
The only people likely to see the arguments of the IEA as persuasive are right-wing libertarians and other neo-liberals who are probably already on board with decriminalisation. The people you need to convince are the ones who are not committed to either side but who may sympathise with some of the leftist arguments proposed by neo-feminists.
Now, applying the dictum “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” I can see, as someone from the working class, that neo-feminists who reject IEA arguments must therefore be my allies, no? After all, I am neither a sex worker nor a client so my rational self-interest must be to align myself with those who reject economic models that disadvantage me.
Or maybe, just maybe, I should go with my feelings rather than abrogating my moral responsibility to so-called experts and their bogus rationalisations. Maybe I should support sex workers because they’re human beings worthy of my support and reject the IEA because it’s an inhuman institution doing the bidding of its sponsors.
I’m tempted to say to spare me the classist claptrap, but I’ll refrain from doing so. Fortunately, most people don’t see the world this way, so there is still hope that arguments that are practical and make sense will appeal to a large enough segment of society so that eventually decriminalization’s time will come, just as it has come to other just causes.
To give a concrete historical example:
In the 1960s the libertarian criticalist psychiatrist Thomas Szasz aligned himself with Scientologists because they were highlighting the same psychiatric abuses of human rights as was he – though they obviously had their own agenda that had little to do with the rights of patients.
When criticised by fellow anti-psychiatrists Szasz responded with “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.
Since then the agenda of Scientology has become clearer to the broader public and Szasz’s perfectly valid arguments have been consistently blunted by those who accuse him of being in bed with the Hubbardists (or a closeted Scientologist himself). Regardless of whether they’re rational, those kinds of responses to Szasz have obvious traction, even in journals such as the BMJ.
Maggie’s critics would like to paint her as part of the ‘pimp lobby’ – some kind of imaginary industry pressure group that may well find it worthwhile to donate to groups like the IEA. Whether she still chooses to align herself with the IEA is up to her, but by rejecting those who disagree she is wedging the core of her own constituency in favour of those who probably don’t really give a fuck.
Thought it possibly useful to some to have a link to Hakim’s August, 2015, study again:
http://www.iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/DP_Supply%20and%20Desire_61_amended_web.pdf
Thanks!
Thanks; a long though interesting read.
Well, Hakim is obviously primarily interested in truth and how things actually work. (And obviously very smart and perceptive.) Hence she places science first. That makes her an ally of those that understand or want to know how things like prostitution and male/female sexuality actually work, but a mortal enemy of anybody that works by belief and ideology.
This explains why neo-feminists hate her (because their mental construct is pure fantasy, ignores reality and hence is at best pseudo-science, and deep down they know it), but it may also explain why some groups of sex-workers do not see her as an ally. I suspect that these groups also operate more on myth and some kind or romanticism with regards to what they do than on fact. That makes Hakim a huge danger to them and that may explain some of the lukewarm reaction. Most people do not have Maggie’s merciless honesty and pragmatism and instead operate more-or-less on fantasy and self-delusion. Sex-workers seem to be no exception to that.
Of course I may be completely off, but that is the beauty of partially fact-based speculation: You can have a discussion.
If you read the article you’d know that one of Hakim’s chief claims to fame is her development of preference economics – a model based heavily on the thoroughly discredited ‘rational choice’ theory. She doesn’t sound too smart to me.
“This is a war, not a game; our enemies use tactics specifically intended to expose us to police violence and starve us to death if we manage to escape that.”
With words like this, again I ask, why then are whores not arming themselves to defend against violence, no matter who may be perpetrating it? Without weapons, it’s not a war, it’s merely a slaughter.
A small slaughter can be turned into a large-scale one if the inferior side starts to escalate. Not a smart strategy. The problem is that violence cannot really be used to defend against violence, it can only be used for revenge, pre-preemptive strikes and escalation. Or put differently: Owning a gun is likely to make things worse for you, with very rare exceptions.
That’s because right now the inferior side has no leader (on the order of a Washington) and no overarching strategy to exploit the weaknesses, few though they may be, of the superior side. It reminds me of that image of the hippy sticking flowers in gun barrels; makes a nice metaphor, but completely ineffective. I’d love it if freedom could be won without firing a shot in anger, however right now I don’t see how lofty words about how everyone deserves human rights will keep you alive when the police kick in your door to arrest you for consensual sex or drug use. Just out of curiosity, did you ever read an article that Maggie once linked here titled “Burn the —-ing System Down”? I did, and it seems there’s a not insignificant number of people who are past the point of caring whether this steady drip-drip-drip of a one-sided slaughter turns into a bigger one if it means that eventually the slaughter stops.
However, if people here actually agree with you, then I wish everyone would drop the martial language that surrounds issues like this. At this point, I don’t know if we’re supposed to like this EIA organization coming out in favor of decriminalization or not, but if any organization in this day and age is willing to say “decriminalization is right” and is willing to pony up the time, effort (and MONEY) to put in charge individuals who will make it a reality, then who cares who they are?
On an unrelated note, whatever happened to Krulac? This seems like the sort of thing he’d be all over but I haven’t seen him comment here in weeks.
Krulac’s been working in a place with almost no internet connectivity. He sent me an email a few weks ago in one of the rare moments it could get through.
What I am saying is that violence is an offensive tool, not a defensive one. If you go on the offensive in an escalation of violence, you must be willing and able to out-escalate the other side or the act amounts to suicide. As it has become basically impossible for citizens to out-escalate a stable nation state when it comes to violence, it is not a smart strategy.
In the case at hand, this will very likely not stop the slaughter eventually unless it gets large enough to destabilize the state. That does mean things like cops and soldiers gunning down crowds in the streets though and it means rebuilding a failed state afterwards.
Are you sure you want to go there?
I myself do not, but it seems like a growing number of people do.
The short answer is, yes. It achieved its objective. What would you propose instead? Leaving the Soviets in Afghanistan? leave the locals to own and resolve the problem themselves rather than giving support to factions with a medievalist agenda.
Comparing the plight of sex workers with that of regime changes in a military situation is really callous and cowardly. To alleviate “Dehumanization,” one can not leave people to crawl in there own pain, made by situations beyond them and little help from selfish people. If you can honestly say you would sit idly by while a woman or man is being defrauded, oppressed, and abused then you are not helping the situation and as Maggie said in the end of this column, you should not even venture to give aid or read further. You have refused to put yourself in their shoes and carry a sense of entitlement that is not in relation to the real world. Thus faction or no faction, millions or dollars or dead beat poor, you have become a hindrance to the economic, social, and internal empowerment of the individuals as the fore-mentioned, defenders of their trade.
When you begin to look at a sex worker as a craftsman or artisan looking for equal pay and a safe environment in which to live, then you would no longer presume to degrade the issue with notions such as “medievalist agenda’s.”