Category Archives: feminisms

there is no single body of beliefs to be called feminism. rather, feminism comes in different schools and tones

An Interest in the Backside of Things

All our lives society has been represented to us as a hierarchy or pyramid in which the rich are located at the top, the middle class sits underneath and workers sprawl at the bottom. Anything lower than the bottom is called underclass, a lot of dysfunctional nobodies. Isn’t it still assumed everyone is striving to move up this ladder? Failure is constructed as happening downwards, a falling into an abyss – the word Jack London and Mary Higgs used to describe how the poor were forced to live.

For my history-walk about the poor in St Giles I did research on social reformers’ fear of cellars. How can that be? you’ll say, why, the best people now live in garden flats. From the 18th century for a long time cellar-living was considered to be appalling by those living well above ground. Cellar-dwellers were conceived of as more animal than human, an indistinguishable mass likened to moles and worms. Rescuers and reformers sought to raise up the miserable from their low position, Fallen Women first. In Gustave Doré’s drawing of the market in Dudley Street, the cellars are surrounded by old shoes and boots. Some see misery here; others don’t. Doré clearly felt sympathy with the cellar-dwellers.

What if instead of a hierarchy low-to-high we think of sides of the story: that the version we hear of current events and history is the Front Side, the official version told from the point of view of those who have the greatest communications-power. Their view places themselves at the centre, where stated aims and values are not questioned. The facade of the palace.

But for every such frontside, there are backsides, other realities, and that’s where the goings and comings of most people take place. Out of the limelight and usually out of historical accounts, too.

That’s the meaning in the title of my tour The Backside of Knightsbridge Barracks. The front of the barracks-complex faces Hyde Park; horse guards in military regalia on their way to perform ceremonial duties exit under an elaborate late-19th-century pediment. A classic Frontside.

The back of the buildings face onto where for several hundred years poorly-paid soldiers, their girlfriends, wives, children and hangers-on scraped together livings. Knightsbridge (the street) was scene of goings-on that wealthy folks called disorderly, meaning drunkenness, carousing, noise, fights, streetwalking, numerous pubs and two major music halls whose raucous style of entertainment suited the working class. Sites of Low Pleasures, according to those set on raising the tone of the area.

The walk looks at the houses where servants and tradespeople lived in what were built as mean and cheap little houses but are today the height of fashion. I talk about stable lads and grooms, dressmakers and laundresses, all the trades needed to service the rich. Two well-known courtesans appear, both with good manners and nice clothes but always trying to persuade their admirers to grant them annuities to live on and houses to live in. They don’t seem to be working-class, but they were certainly working. And there’s the story of a lowly horse guard and his dollymop-turned-wife, struggling to make ends meet. One Frontside superstar does appear, the Duke of Wellington, because he got in a fracas with one of the courtesans. Oh and his superstar horse Copenhagen appears when we’re walking in Rotten Row in the park. It’s a horsey walk.

The Backside of Knightsbridge Barracks happens on Saturday 20 January.

My other walks show other kinds of backsides:
Sunday 28 January is about The Medieval Female Proletariat in Southwark.
Saturday 10 February takes on the connections between London’s Sex Industry and the Stage in the Long 18th Century.
On Saturday 2 March it’s Primrose Hill, where navvies built canal and railways.
It’s right in the title on Sunday 17 March: Working-class Migrations to Holborn: Irish, Italian, African, Jewish

And I just published a new walk, Disgraceful Women of Old St John’s Wood, that shows the backside of that ultimate bourgeois value, Respectability.

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

I’ve won a prize: Women’s History Network Independent Researcher Grant

The best thing about this award is the fact that someone like myself can qualify at all. The Women’s History Network, recognising those doing rigorous research without being employed academics, have a separate grant category for us. I shared this prize with three other women.

My proposal was to expand the research I did about working women in medieval Southwark to the same group in Norwich. While I was reading in the British Library, on and off for a couple of years, references often led me to Norwich’s development as a medieval urban centre, so of course I’ve wanted to research there. My questions would be the same I asked about Southwark: How did poorer women get by? What work did they do? Having comparable information from East Anglia will give shape and balance to the Southwark data about women I like to call the Medieval Female Proletariat.

One example from the Norfolk Record Office illustrates what I’d be looking for:
Norwich:File BL/CS 3/67

Proclamation by corporation of King’s Lynn ordering young unmarried women between 12 and 40, who have no visible means of living, to go out to service or be sent to the house of correction.

Singlewomen – the civil status assigned to women who’d never married – were considered loose cannon, prostitutes in the making, obvious troublemakers. Singlewomen couldn’t by definition be heads of households; they were told to become a servant in someone else’s household if they couldn’t manage to get married. As a wife, they would be ‘protected’ by husbands, which is another way to say they’d be kept in line.

This example also signals the connection between this project and my decades of previous research into migration: Women leave home to find new places to try to live without authority figures trying to crush them into being housemaids, unwilling wives or prisoners.

What did I promise to do with the results of this research? Why create a walk about it in Norwich of course. And include it in the Southwark walk and probably some other new walk I haven’t invented yet. It’s encouraging the Women’s History Network recognise walks as a good product of research.

So sometime this winter when prices are lower and the weather absolute crap, I’ll go to Norwich for some days and visit the cathedral to see in person this sculpture of a medieval laundress in the act of being robbed by a barefoot boy. She’s a roof boss in the cloister, one of very few representations of medieval women to be seen in a public English place.

And if there’s any way to stretch the money I’ll go to Portsmouth, too.

—Laura Agustín, The Naked Anthropologist

Open for Business: London Walks with Gender, Sex and Class

Why do most historical accounts fail to mention women? And not only women but just about every ordinary non-famous non-rich person that ever was, even in accounts of poverty and want? Why do historians make men 100% of the protagonists in all events? Remember the example of the 11th-century Bayeux Tapestry: 70 metres long depicting 626 human figures, 190 horses, 35 dogs and 3 women. Does anyone believe women weren’t there, in any of the scenes, on either side of the Channel, doing anything significant for a long period culminating in the Battle of Hastings? The idea is ridiculous. But as the pictures accompanying this post show, men are usually the only ones portrayed.

This post launches my new business, which I had first thought of calling the Little Shop of Women’s Walks. Twenty years ago I think that name would have been fine, but nowadays the word – the very category – women is fraught with conflict. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who identifies as a woman can be one; I’m not making a category with boundaries. And I’m not only interested in females of the species. I could say women and other marginalised people, but do I have to? My interest is to uncover and create histories of those usually left out of historical accounts, and that often means everyone who isn’t an educated man. Oh sure, a few heroic or social-reforming women and people of colour get talked about, but in many cases it’s because they were literate and could nearly pass as middle-class.

When considering telling a history, whose point of view do you take? In most histories the author presumes to have an objective meta-overview of events and to know what’s important and what’s trivial. In these accounts women are usually subordinates or walk-on characters and the poor and working-class hardly appear unless they are the objects of bourgeois charity. When Antonio Gramsci referred to the subaltern and Southeast Asian scholars built a field of studies on it, they put at the centre people rarely given their due in histories.

So: far from being original I’m building on everyone who’s griped about the omissions for a long time. It’s what I did in the research for Sex at the Margins, when I asked why a lot of feminist and middle-class activists and commentators were so upset about ‘prostitution’ when so many people prefer selling sex to their other options for making money. For so many women primarily but also for so many queers, gays, neurodivergent, disabled and a list of other identities and physical traits. Now I want to take this view to the streets, on guided walks anyone can sign up for, in versions of history where the Usual Suspects aren’t the main characters.

Of course some tours do take women as their subjects, most often middle-class reformers or philanthropists, nurses and doctors, creative artists and authors. The mistresses of important men are mentioned, as well as queens and aristocrats. All I want to do is focus on everyone not in those groups!

To sum up, I’m describing my business as London Walks with Gender, Sex and Class. Social class is even probably the most obvious thing I want to focus on: lives of working folks, hoi polloi, proletarians. The assumption that everyone wants to become Middle Class or higher permeates culture, its being understood that achieving that status requires not only having more money but also embracing the values and etiquette.

I’m closing in on 78 years old, which nowadays doesn’t even mean much, in the sense one is not necessarily ill or lame. I’ve liked computers from the beginning and don’t mind learning new routines and mastering the details, but I don’t want to spend all my time in front of screens. A lot of that is required to plan and research a walking tour, but afterwards I get to spend time in the streets, in all weathers, with live people: talking about things that matter to me, answering questions and objection,s and if I can manage it ending in a pub.

I’ve put four walks up for sale  in my Eventbrite account. The first I described in Scratching Out A Living, about 14th-century working women in Southwark, and two more treat the very poor in 18th-century Seven Dials and working people ranged around the Knightsbridge Barracks in the 19th century. Then there’s a walk in Primrose Hill that rather than focusing on famous ‘celebrities’ that have lived there looks at how the area came to be because of the coming of the railway, whose workers lived there first. I’ll be repeating these walks on future dates, so if something looks interesting but the date doesn’t work, there will be other chances.
follow me on Eventbrite to receive alerts about new dates for walks.

I’ve officially qualified, having done a very long course with Camden Tour Guides Association (Camden is a central London borough), so I’m covered by public liability insurance to guide anywhere in the UK, and am also guiding in Essex with Rob Smith.

I’ve also begun to offer private tours on a platform called ToursByLocals. There you can get a walking tour for just you and a friend designed for you by me. So if you like the sound of one of the walks you see but want to change it, you can ask by pressing the message-button. These custom-created tours often involve doing original research, and if you want to know the quality of my research look at the Publications tag on the top menu on this page: many of the items there could only have been written by doing careful research, and I don’t mean googling a topic and looking at random webpages. Reading books can be a long slog, but it’s how you do historical research, preferably in primary sources, to avoid perpetuating myths found in erroneous accounts of events. You read to understand the broader context for the specific event that interests you.

Or you can write to me on the contact form on the right-hand side of this page and ask for what you want, custom-made for you, outside the ToursByLocals platform. If you’ve researched someone non-famous who lived in London or nearby (perhaps during Ancestry searches) and would like to be shown the area, I’ll do the research to create a tour about that person in the relevant epoch in that place. There only needs to be a tube or rail station fairly near the destination, or a bus or even a taxi that can be called for a last remote stretch. I’m not a driver-guide or a black cabbie: my walks are about the joy of walking.

Follow this blog: Encourage me if nothing else. It’s no longer easy to distribute via social media without paying, and I’m not convinced, if I were to pay, that the famous algorithms would send the post to a rather subtle target-audience. The place to enter your email address is at the top of the right-hand column on this page.

And follow me on Eventbrite.

You get my point about the pictures: They all came up quickly in a simple random search of the word history on a site offering images in the public domain.

—Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Scratching out a living: The Medieval Female Proletariat – A guided walk

As part of the Totally Thames Festival to be held in September 2023 I’m offering a walk I created, Scratching out a living by the river: The Medieval female proletariat, on the 10th and the 20th. This guided walk reflects years of work searching for histories of women who weren’t nobles or royals or kings’ mistresses in the Middle Ages. I’m interested in the medieval female proletariat, as was obvious in my previous walk on the Witches of Manningtree.

In the near-total absence of mention of ordinary (non-wealthy) women in all kinds of histories, and after reading long and hard about everything else about the period, I created six characters who were in search of an author: Me. You’ll meet them on this tour: scullery maid, alewife, washerwoman, brothel worker, huckster, vitteller. A huckster was a woman selling goods in the street, and a vitteller (victualler) was a foodmonger, selling in various settings (think of the word ‘vittels’ in old Western movies). Since few poor women could subsist on the takings from only one job, others besides the brothel-worker sold sex in the streets or in unlicensed bawdy houses. The map at the top, Norden’s from 1593, captures well the area of the river near London Bridge.

The British Library, Add. 42130 f.163v Detail from the Luttrell Psalter, 1325-35, showing women milking sheep and carrying things on their heads.

During several long lockdowns in London, the British Library instated a booking system and procedures for using the Reading Rooms that made working there sometimes infuriating – but also somehow more satisfying than usual. At a certain point I knew there’d be no mentions of individual poorer women anywhere I looked and decided to examine illuminated manuscripts. For a brief period scribes and illustrators (most not monks), mostly in East Anglia, decorated the margins of English manuscripts of religious texts with drawings of people: sometimes peasants, often hybrid monsters and sometimes recognisable women. Working in the Manuscript Room was a revelation, and I did learn how women were looked at – mostly in ways we call misogynistic. Women were considered lustful, untrustworthy and inferior, the sources of men’s problems. Hey ho, I’m an anthropologist and can cope.

The question was How do we know what women were doing if no man recorded it? Before the coming of the printing-press, scribes kept track of certain kinds of accounts and activities, and some monks wrote diaries. But no one described in words what poor women were doing: They belonged to the lowest order of society, close to beasts, and their activities were clearly not thought worth describing: someone had to scrub the floors and empty the chamberpots, that’s all.

Gender-discrimination is key. Take the 11th-century Bayeux Tapestry, which is 70 metres long, depicting 626 human figures, 190 horses, 35 dogs and 3 women. Three in a long story taking place in multiple houses, castles, ships and towns in the build-up to the Battle of Hastings. Does anyone think women weren’t there, leaving battles out of it for the moment? One of the three was a queen, one is considered a mysterious figure and the third is a sort of Everywoman, seen fleeing from the burning of her village (holding a child’s hand, above). The number increases to four if you include a naked female in a sex-scene in the margin. Women were disappeared from history simply by not including pictures of them.

The British Library, Women spinning and carding wool, Detail from the Luttrell Psalter, 1325-35, Add. 42130.

Another kind of disappearance can be seen in guilds like the Worshipful Company of Clothworkers, who formed in the 16th century by amalgamating earlier companies of weavers, fullers and shearmen. But when the clothworkers defined themselves they began at a point in the production of cloth after all tasks conventionally allotted to women were finished: carding, combing and spinning the wool that were necessary before weaving and producing something called cloth. Entrepreneurial men called clothiers organised the distribution and collection of wool carded, combed and spun in women’s homes, and then when guilds were forming they simply left out all that processing. Spinning on the Great Wheel takes great skill, so it couldn’t be claimed that those early processes were somehow too easy to include. One woman historian charmed me by concluding, after long study of spinning all over the British Isles, that men weren’t able to do it.

And of course disappearance of women was also juridical, as when women married and ceased to appear in records. Many women ran businesses of their own in the City of London around Cheapside, a centre of London shopping: we know this because of the trade cards they had printed to advertise, such as this one for Esther Burney. But if they married their names disappeared from the record, their businesses now legally belonging to their husbands. The women were most probably still running them but they suffered a civil death (known as coverture).

The question is what you think history is: The formal activities of royalty and nobility, a tiny proportion of the whole population? The activities of men, particularly the wealthy? Anything related to national government policy and the politicians who made it? For me such histories are simply inadequate.

The particular project reflected in my Southwark walk concerned the river. Some years ago I did a training run by the Thames Discovery Programme to join the Foreshore Recording and Observation Group (FROG – the foreshore being the area along the Thames covered and uncovered by twice-a-day tides). At one point a document was written giving a history of human activities alongside and on the river. There was no single mention of women or female activities anywhere, and I decided That’s it, I’m doing something about this. So I set out to research and as described above found almost nothing there.

So: How do we know what women were and weren’t doing on the river if they are never mentioned in histories? We can’t conclude they stayed at home taking care of children all the time if they were poor. We can’t even conclude they had a home, though obviously they ate and slept somewhere. We can’t know they didn’t participate in the many occupations recorded for men, because there’s no evidence of their being forbidden. Occupation-names often included -man, but that doesn’t mean the person involved was male.

If what is called data is required, then the first that informs us about poorer women’s work in London may be the Poll Tax Return of 1381 for Southwark, now a borough of the city lying at the southern end of London Bridge. For centuries Southwark’s population lived mainly along the riverside, so this area is a good place to begin to create history about what women were doing. The occupations of my characters were all common and known, though most of them probably didn’t pay well enough income to make them liable for paying poll tax.

Photo looking down at the Stew Lane foreshore by Uy Hoang, from Google streetview

All the women relied on water-sources (the river, tidal marshes and springs) to do their work. I have tried to bring them to life in talks I’ve given, and now on a walk where we can stand where they would have stood. Tiny remnants of the 14th century do remain if you use your imagination, like with this image by Uy Hoang from Google streetview that shows the foreshore at the end of Stew Lane on the north bank of the river. This is where the guided walk ends, where wherries picked up clients bound for the brothels and rowed them to the south bank. Whether you call them sex workers, prostitutes or whores, they belonged to the medieval female proletariat.
To follow the story of how I am researching women-and-other-oddballs’ histories to make guided walks, please subscribe to this blog at the top of the right-hand column.

Or follow me on Eventbrite to know when new walks are out.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

The Witches of Manningtree: A Walk on the River Stour

PUBLIC NOTICE: I’ve become a qualified tour guide. Not because I want to take tourists to see the changing of the guard or other typical tourist delights but because I’ve been an inveterate walker all my life and I like talking about pieces of the past other folks might not know about – while walking. You can see me doing it in this photo from my first paid walk, and you can read more about it on the page called London Walks. My fists are out because I was demonstrating a method for ‘swimming’ women accused of witchcraft.

This walk was led along with Rob Smith, a longtime guide and friend. In the past year we have become enamoured with estuaries in the county of Essex – sprawling tidal rivers that end at the North Sea. The landscape can be spectacularly bleak when the tide is out and all is mud.

The co-leading project started last year when we were walking in Manningtree and Mistley, two small towns on the south bank of the River Stour. Various signs portrayed a man named Matthew Hopkins, who had a brief but nasty career identifying witches in East Anglia in the 17th century. You may remember him as the villain played by Vincent Price in the 1968 horror film Witchfinder-General. Price was nearly 60 when he played the actually only 24-year-old Hopkins, but Never mind, villains who cruelly misuse innocent women are a classic trope, and good fun was had by all watching the movie.

What happened was Rob began making comments about Hopkins and witches, and I kept saying Er, not really, it was more like this or that, and suchlike. Because in my decades of studying the victimising of women I must have thought as much about witches as about prostitutes. The walk proceeded to other things, but towards the end Hopkins reappeared as one-time landlord of a pub with a misleading plaque about him on the wall. I objected, and we discussed it some more, and eventually Rob suggested we do a walk on it.

My stops, as they’re called in the trade, addressed the witch craze. But instead of centring Hopkins I focused on three women accused of witchcraft: Anne and Rebecca West of Lawford and Elizabeth Clarke of Manningtree. We know a few facts about these women because they were accused, charged and tried, and two of them were hanged.

The backdrop to this witch craze was the English Civil War, which for the Parliamentary side (Roundheads) was a moral crusade. For them the Reformation had not gone far enough; war was required to establish true religion and halt the roman catholic back-sliding of Charles I.

The two-guide walk began on a recent Saturday in the village of Lawford, whose church bears the scars of iconoclasm: sculpture with heads smashed in by Roundhead troops or locals offended by objects associated with old bad ways (click on the picture to see the smashes).

By the mid-17th century numerous Protestant groups had disassociated themselves from the established church of England; they are often grouped together as Dissenters or Non-conformists. But there was one group more passionately attached to this war than others: the Puritans. In East Anglia and Essex, Puritans were numerous and powerful. Their goal was to purify England’s religion; it was a struggle against the anti-Christ that entailed finding and rooting out those in league with the devil.

In the atmosphere of insecurity and mistrust that reigns in civil-war societies, paranoia about the neighbours easily comes to seem normal. This is the context in which a wave of witchcraft accusations swept through the Manningtree area. Witchcraft had always been considered a fact of life: that some people have the ability to damage others by wishing them evil. Demonology was a popular topic; James I had written one of his own.

Many able and intelligent men had left their villages to fight in the war. Women left behind were viewed according to marital status: Wives enjoyed the legal protection of their husbands; widows had rights. But singlewomen, the term used for the never-married, were thought to be morally weak, uncontrolled and unreliable, making them quite vulnerable to exploitation.

There is also a sexual component: Puritans wanted to suppress activities previously seen as acceptable, like theatre, dancing and sex outside marriage. They saw these behaviours as evidence of ‘witches’ sabbaths’: carousing and sex with the devil. Young women like Rebecca were easily viewed as dangerously lustful.

The witch-finding described here took place between 1644 and 1647 within a legal framework. Three acts had been passed in the previous century: in 1542, 1562 and 1604. But for the law to proceed against anyone, someone had to make an accusation against them, citing a specific harm done.

Anne and Rebecca West had a history of tiffs with their close neighbours, the Harts, and now Prudence Hart said she suffered a painful miscarriage and paralysis at the hands of Rebecca. Thomas Hart said their son had died crying Rebecca’s name, and Anne was accused of causing a boy’s death some years earlier.

In Manningtree, just to the east of Lawford, a man named John Rivet accused 80-yr-old Elizabeth Clarke of bewitching his wife. Elizabeth said she was a witch and knew other witches, but she wouldn’t name them. Remember that the word witch could connote good powers as well as bad, and a woman who knew herbs and felt spiritual, clairvoyant or intuitive did not have to be ashamed of it. Some folks were called white witches, good witches, blessers, wizards, sorcerers and cunning or wise folk. But the news of Clarke’s confession was taken to a local landowner, John Stearne, who took it to magistrates. They gave him permission to investigate Clarke. Matthew Hopkins, son of a Suffolk minister, had moved to Manningtree and volunteered to help Stearne. Both men had read the many treatises against witchcraft and believed in the evil.

In her confession Clarke implicated other women including Anne and Rebecca West. All three women were accused of entertaining demons in the shape of small animals called familiars, or imps. Cats, dogs, rabbits, frogs, ferrets, owls appear in pictures of the time. Stearne and Hopkins watched Clarke for three nights and said they saw her familiars. Under the 1604 Act Against Witchcraft, the keeping of familiars was punishable by death.

Investigations consisted largely in interrogating women to get them to confess to pacts with the devil. They were walked up and down night after night to prevent their sleeping. Respected women of the town were given the job of searching the accuseds’ bodies looking for ‘devil’s marks’ or ‘teats’ their familiars were thought to suck blood from. The marks were searched for and found between women’s legs, using a metal pricking device. The test was said to be that if women didn’t scream in pain when pricked on a teat then they must be witches. But the tool was spring-loaded so the pricker could be retracted into the handle, meaning women didn’t scream – which constituted evidence of being a witch. [This device is on display in Colchester Castle.]

A number of local women became expert searchers. Mary Phillips was a Manningtree midwife who accompanied Hopkins and Stearne when they began travelling. The focus on marks was a hallmark of English trials.

Accused women were also tested by ‘swimming’ in a pond, tied crossways (opposite thumbs to big toes) and held by a rope under their armpits so they could be dragged in and out of the water. Since it was believed the pure element of water would reject evil, floating was believed to be a sign of guilt. But the men wielding the rope would have had good control over this test, and it is this specific practice that provoked most opposition to the witch-finders. Parliament eventually forbade the use of swimming in these investigations.

Hopkins called himself Witchfinder-General and had local support, but he had no mandate from parliament. It’s useful to remember that at this period there was no institution of police, so individuals’ taking it upon themselves to catch criminals was normal. In the legal framework, however, neither he nor Stearne could decide to investigate on their own initiative: there had to be an accusation from an ordinary citizen. What the two men did is awful, but neither of them has struck me as particularly fiendish or even interesting. By offering to investigate they gained power and status and some money, but the amounts weren’t enough to make them rich.

Word of the investigations spread, and Hopkins and Stearne were invited to other towns: to so many places over a short period that it merits being called a witch craze, the term usually used about the phenomenon in European countries. Amounts are recorded in the towns of Aldeburgh and Stowmarket in Suffolk and Kings Lynn in Norfolk that were paid to the men to clear the towns of witches.

There were doubters, and in some East Anglian places opposition nipped witch-finding in the bud. For this to happen there had to be male authority-figures present who dared to scoff. A minister named John Gaule of Great Staughton in Huntingdonshire objected that parishioners were talking more about witch trials than about God and made it clear that witchfinders were not welcome. Hopkins was questioned at the Norfolk Assizes about his methods and about how was it that he was able to detect witches: was he something special? This led to his publishing a defence, The Discovery of Witches, where he answered criticisms point by point. The bible was quoted: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. (Exodus 22:18).

But his chief defence was that he and Stearne only went where they were invited. Even in Manningtree Hopkins and Stearne couldn’t have succeeded without support: at least 100 witnesses testified against accused women. Eventually 36 women from the Manningtree area (the Tendring Hundred) were arrested on charges of witchcraft and imprisoned in ghastly conditions in Colchester Castle. Four died of plague. Hopkins travelled there to get Rebecca West to tell him about witches’ sabbaths attended by the group: This would be proof they were in league with each other. Rebecca gave him what he wanted.

The women were taken to Chelmsford Assizes to be tried. Elizabeth Clarke and 31 others were convicted and hanged there. Four of the convicted were brought to the village green in Manningtree and hanged: Anne West was one of them. Rebecca was spared, having testified against her mother. Did Anne advise Rebecca to save herself? Did Hopkins offer her a deal?

To me the fundamental question is how could it become common and acceptable to accuse your neighbours of witchcraft knowing death was the penalty? The county of Essex accounted for 59% of witchcraft prosecutions, and another large per cent occurred nearby. During the Hopkins-Stearne trials some 250 witches were accused and at least 100 were hanged.

Hopkins’s death at age 26 in August 1647 is recorded in the Mistley parish register; Stearne said he died of consumption. He was buried in a churchyard now decrepit, and his ghost is said to haunt a nearby pond. In the face of growing opposition Stearne found he had other things to do, though he also published a treaty on witchfinding. He then retired, and the craze fizzled out.

Novels written by historians can often illuminate sketchy history, bringing unknown persons from the past to life. I can recommend A. K. Blakemore’s novel The Manningtree Witches, in which Rebecca is the principal character. After the hangings she leaves town and travels to London, surely a likely outcome after what she’d been through. Blakemore then has her getting a ship to the New World. Since the destination could well have been Massachusetts, already settled by many Essex Puritans, word of who she was would follow her, making this quite a charged proposition. She could easily have become a prostitute, though.

What I’ve recounted here took place on a walk through rolling countryside on the eastern edge of Dedham Vale (Constable country), on paths Rebecca and Anne would have trodden, then along the River Stour at high tide with a classic beach-scene in progress, and on streets where 16th- and 17th-century houses are masked by Georgian facades. Rob talked about other periods, including Richard Rigby’s failed attempt to make Mistley a spa in the 18th century. We saw Robert Adam-designed towers and late 19th-century factory buildings and pubs where Hopkins and Stearne could have met with locals to gossip. We all stopped for a drink in one that’s next to the green where Anne West was hanged: the darkest moment in the walk, but somehow more meaningful because you are actually there. We stopped at the kind of pond where ‘swimming’ would have been carried out, which you see me describing in the photo at the start.

Many dismiss the events I’ve described as being nowadays unthinkable superstitious hooey. Hangings aside, I can personally think of several similar crazes that have happened in my lifetime that punish innocent-enough individuals, which you can read about in posts on this blog going back to 2008.

Note about sources: I’ve been able to see assize-court records, as well as mass-printed news pamphlets, which is where ordinary people would have become familiar with names, accusations and hangings and seen wood-cuts depicting witches’ activities. Those were the popular media of the time. I read many scholarly works giving statistics and interpreting events in various ways. As for focusing on the accused women, I’m far from the first person to do it. In the course of my research I was given two walking brochures by Alison Rowlands at the University of Essex that centre victims, created by a number of local Essex women. One is called Walking with WitchesAlison also gave me the name of a former student, James Cundick, who made maps of Hopkins and Stearne’s travels, as well of those of William Dowsing, the Iconoclast-General in charge of smashing down popishness in churches. In the screen-capture above, taken from James’s map, you see the area I’ve been talking about. All these sources helped me put together my own ideas. Thank you James and Alison.

I took the photo in Lawford church, Rob took the other photos, and I believe the various woodcuts and early printings are in the public domain. If they’re not, please let me know.

Yes we’ll offer the walk again, and we’re getting another estuary walk ready now. Yes my own walks will be in London; I’m working on those. Subscribe to this blog and you’ll find out. Leave any questions or comments below and I’ll respond.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sexbuyer laws: War on clients, says Israeli MP

Sexbuyer laws now exist in eight countries at the national level: Israel, France, Canada, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden. I use the term sexbuyer laws because in mainstream news ‘Nordic Model’ appears more and more frequently in its fundamental meaning: a kind of social democracy Nordic countries generally espouse. And also because the legislation no longer attaches to any region, rather pointing to a vision of Gender Equality focussed on universal symbolic meanings. Prostitution appears to be the most powerful symbol of women’s oppression this vision knows, and laws to punish men who buy sex are currently its most popular goal. Such a campaign has just succeeded in Israel.

MP Shelly Yachimovich commented the war on the clients of prostitutes is similar to the war on slavery and the freeing of slaves, no less.

It’s not the first time war has been mentioned by campaigners against prostitution. In 2011 I said in The Bad Vibrations of Anatomical Fundamentalism I feel like the veteran of a long, drawn-out war. I first knew it as the War Between the Sexes… Now it feels like a World Gender War, in which a small number of women endeavour to bring all men and all disagreeing women to their knees.

With talk of war we leave conventional liberal justice-discourse deploring prostitution as violence against women. Yachimovich’s comment wants to increase the symbolic weight of anti-prostitutionism by invoking war and slavery. This has been done in the US by Rescue-Industry figures engaged in raising their own status: See The Thrill of Rescue, in which an NGO head says:

… Growing up just after the 1960s I feared that I had missed my chance to take part in the most important movement in our country. I now know that I have found my place — and that all of us can step up and join a movement that matters. This year, I became CEO of The Global Fund for Children… The torch has been passed to us. Putting an end to modern day slavery is our civil rights movement. Now it’s our time to make a difference, and we must continue to work together to ensure that people everywhere are free.

Years later I continue to be struck by this individual’s fear she might ‘lose out’ if there were no transcendent cause to devote herself to; is this what the true ‘social-justice warrior’ needs to exist? You might think the desire to grant meaningfulness to one’s life is harmless, but when one’s driving an NGO, ‘non-profit’ status fails to describe the benefits that accrue to those claiming to help, save, lift up and enlighten.

The desire to help may be sincere, but when observing a longterm mess like prostitution policy it’s essential to take into account how helpers benefit themselves. See The Construction of Benevolent Identities, the archtype of which you see in the picture of a nurse with her lamp. Woe betide anyone who doubts this kind of helping. MPs campaigning for a law reap prestige that aids their careers.


 
I think of sexbuyer laws as ‘European’ in style, and certainly the rhetoric and actions taken by Israeli campaigners align with a vogue in which young women demonstrate against prostitution. In one protest women put themselves on display in a shopping mall complete with descriptive price-tags. Israel’s Law Against Prostitution Heralds a New Era of Gender Equality booms a headline. But another title noted Israel joins small club of nations, evoking a Euro-elitism in which equality is not exactly the goal.

Israeli news items mention government-backed research released in 2016 in relation to the legislation. The report describes workers in various sectors of the sex industry in three cities via a standard sociological survey. There is nothing surprising in it. More than half the sexworkers came to Israel from another country, which is unremarkable in the Mediterranean context. All the research does is demonstrate the existence of a sex sector providing jobs to women, with stories of how they needed money and couldn’t find better jobs. You can read a short description in English of the research results but note the twist when they say ‘economic hardship’ is prostitution’s cause and prostitutes ‘could not stop’. It’s a way to make money many take as preferable to other options; it’s work.

Two points are interesting to me. First, interviewers were recruited through an entity called Awareness Institute for the Fight against the phenomenon of prostitution, which means inevitably they were biased. Even when only reading questions from a form, interviewers transmit attitudes interviewees detect and may respond to – either by refusing to say much or by providing answers they think interviewers will like. There’s no way to know, but it’s a flaw and odd the investigating team didn’t explain it. They did comment on possible bias because only male interviewers were allowed into most brothels to talk to workers. For my money, the anti-prostitution defect is greater.

Second, in a not new but currently unconventional wrinkle, the law criminalises the fact of simply being in ‘a location chiefly used for prostitution’. Perhaps it’s meant to make the whole business easier, since sexbuying charges are notoriously difficult to prove. The state stands to make a lot of money in fines if patrons continue to visit (fines only are the penalty). If they don’t continue to visit, what happens to sex workers trying to make a living? Sure, ‘rehabilitation and reintegration’ are part of this sexbuyer law, but – need I say again how fruitless such efforts always are? Never mind, symbolic helping has once again been done.

—Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sex workers may unionise – but can prostitutes? The case of Sindicato OTRAS

Last week a Madrid tribunal declared that sex workers can unionise but prostitutes can’t – or that’s what it comes down to. Sindicato OTRAS was granted conventional union status in the summer, having filed the necessary paperwork. But when the news got out, scandalised politicians vowed they wouldn’t allow it, because the current government has declared itself abolitionist. Before long, several women’s organisations in different parts of Spain had put together a lawsuit against the union, on the grounds that prostitution can’t be a job (because it’s violence against women, slavery and so on). I’m simplifying, but believe me, you don’t want to read the convoluted legal language involved.

I spent two evenings with members of Aprosex in late May in Barcelona, one of them a conversatorio with me and many enthusiastic participants held at the headquarters of t.i.c.t.a.c. Shortly afterwards, Aprosex filed papers to become a union: Sindicato OTRAS (Organización de Trabajadoras Sexuales). Sex workers who call themselves anything are welcome: cam-girls, phone-sex operators, strippers, porn actors, bar hostesses, escorts, workers in flats. Some of these offer services many consider to be prostitution.

Job-titles don’t say everything. Some who’ve embraced the term sex worker hate the word prostitute, but a lot of others comfortably use it, especially in Romance languages. A recently-formed group call themselves Colectivo de Prostitutas de Sevilla. The whore-word puta is in process of reclamation, appearing on banners as you see above. Some feel okay calling themselves sex workers as long as it’s clear that they aren’t prostitutes. The paperwork for OTRAS referred to sex work in all its forms, which abolitionists immediately interpreted to mean prostitution: the thing they love to hate.

I don’t need to describe the arguments made by the women’s-group plaintiffs; they are well known. I note their horror that prostitutes, who exist because of patriarchy, can argue that a union will combat it. I have written about anti-prostitution ideas many times, last in The New Abolitionist Model.

But the specific Spanish legal context determined how opponents could argue a lawsuit. In the Penal Code prostitution is not defined as illegal, which rights activists complain leads to alegal status that disadvantages sex workers. You may well think that if an activity is not prohibited or defined as wrong in law then it must by default be considered part of ordinary (legal) life. But the ambiguity has been exploited to claim that if prostitution is not defined as legal work by law and listed in a national register of occupations then it can’t be a job. Porn acting and web-camming might be. The term sex worker seems not precise enough to be, and anyway abolitionists read it as a euphemism for prostitute.

However, it’s more complicated than that. Amongst jobs that are listed in the national register is work in clubes de alterne, bar-venues with private spaces in the back or upstairs for workers to take clients for sex. The word alterne, from the verb alternar, refers to socialising and drinking with customers, and chicas de alterne is a common euphemism for women who work in clubes de carretera, hoteles de plaza, casas de citas and puticlubs – all names of public businesses that may get called brothels, but they may also have a lot more going on in them: films, shows, dance-floors, jacuzzis, who knows what else in a place like the one above in Málaga. Businesses you can call brothels also exist in residential buildings. All these are legal. I wrote more about them in The Sex Industry in Spain. In other parts of the world chicas de alterne are known as bar girls or hostesses.

The Audiencia’s decision noted there would be no problem if chicas de alterne wanted to unionise on the basis of their work socialising. They also do prostitution? No problem. If you find this bizarrely contradictory, consult the Mad Hatter – he understands perfectly. Loopholes like these provide endless paid occupation for lawyers and campaigners like Plataforma 8 de marzo, Comisión para la Investigación de Malos Tratos a Mujeres and L’Escola: women’s organisations who took Sindicato OTRAS to court.

In this case they made many familiar claims about prostitution being violence against women and an obstacle to equality, citing Spanish legislation. They leaned heavily on arguments about trafficking and prostitution being inseparable, quoting EU and UN declarations. But they also claimed that prostitution’s not being an occupation inscribed in Spain’s national job register means that those who practise it can’t be workers because their job does not exist.

Further complications relate to the requirement that workers forming unions need to have the status of employees in a setting where employers define and regulate their work. In the case of prostitution, plaintiffs argued, this would mean managers telling prostitutes how to have sex with clients, which they don’t do. To underscore their point claimants expressed outrage at the possibility that bosses and workers might be able to damage the highly personal nature of sex (personalísimo). The way these repressive arguments opportunistically use the principle of sexual freedom frankly makes me sick.

Requiring workers to assume self-employed status is common practice in sex-industry businesses in many countries, allowing bosses to avoid accusations of pimping and also avoid providing decent working conditions. Being self-employed means workers have no right to negotiate terms or problems in what obviously are workplaces. Individuals may complain to bosses, but only trade unions have the ability to negotiate formally with management without being ignored or simply dismissed. Nota bene: Caveats apply. There is no one meaning to the term trade union, and national contexts differ. Freelance/self-employed/autonomous workers are generally excluded, but new unions want to change that.

OTRAS will appeal to the Supreme Court and meanwhile, despite misleading press headlines, have not been declared illegal. The Audiencia’s decision annulled the group’s statutes (by-laws) but hasn’t the power to dissolve the union (the whole long cryptic decision is at the bottom of the previous link). El Diario did better on the decision than most media outlets.

Everyone wants to know why the association of sex-business owners is allowed to exist. ANELA was inscribed in the national register of associations in 2004, defining their activity as dispensar “productos o servicios” a terceras personas ajenas al establecimiento, “que ejerzan el alterne y la prostitución por cuenta propia”: provide products or services to self-employed third persons… who practise alterne and prostitution.

It is interesting that ANELA’s first attempt to register was also frustrated by the mention of prostitution. Told to remove it because it isn’t legal employment, they refused, citing a 2001 EU court decision that prostitution may be an economic activity for self-employed persons, in the absence of force or coercion. In the same Audiencia (Sala de lo Social) where the case against OTRAS was held, ANELA was initially refused inscription. They appealed to the Supreme Court and won, judges saying that providing the conditions for prostitution to take place doesn’t necessarily make an owner a pimp (proxeneta). Go figure.

Meanwhile, if you weren’t already dazed by contradictions, another sex workers’ union opened this past summer, also in Barcelona. Unión Sindical de Trabajo Sexual was founded as a branch of the already-existing Intersindical Alternativa de Catalunya, and moral crusaders have no argument with it. Not because of which job-titles the workers claim but because, as a branch, they are not a separate autonomous legal entity. I know – it just doesn’t add up.

Enough. I’ve understood for many years that the term prostitution can never be pinned down. It isn’t ‘just a word’: its meaning is far from obvious; its connotations reach deep into patriarchal mechanisms for keeping women down and divided against each other. The comfortable middle-class Spanish feminists desiring to bring down a trade union for sex workers perfectly prove the point. In Prostitution Law and the Death of Whores I went into this in detail.

When I was revising this I saw I hadn’t tagged for Rescue Industry. The hostility of government spokesfolk and organisations that agreed to do their dirty work goes beyond any pretense to be helping and saving. This is about upholding the status quo for a small but influential cadre of privileged women who believe that they Know Best about everything under the sun. Patriarchal hierarchies work for women at the top.

Some things I’ve written about Spain, in English (note Spanish at the bottom):

A novel, The Three-Headed Dog, is set on the Costa del Sol and Madrid, amongst migrants doing various kinds of sex work. In the sequel the setting moves from Galicia through Málaga to Calais and London.

The Sex Industry in Spain: Sex clubs, flats, agriculture, tourism

Highways as sexwork places, with chairs

Who are migrant sex workers?

Sexwork and migration fiction, part 2: Jobs in the sex industry

Change the world by getting men to stop buying sex: Spain

In Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, the field work was carried out in Spain.

Lista de publicaciones mias en castellano

—Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Highways as sexwork-places, with chairs

When the topic is selling sex outdoors, mainstream media stick to the same photos over and over. Generally now posed, the shots show young female bodies chopped off at the head or feet or waist, standing in dark city streets. I don’t need to give an example because you’ve instantly visualised what I’m talking about. So when I posted an item on facebook from The Local that carried this photo with pink and green chairs, many people sounded surprised.

If you don’t bring a chair, sometimes there’s a kerb to sit on. If there’s not, you might lean on metal barriers. But chairs of all portable types are common along highways in Cataluña, despite longtime attempts by local communities and police to stop the whole activity. Gavà, Castelldefels, Viladecans, Les Filipines – not far from the beach or downtown Barcelona. Places where traffic slows down, where there’s a place to pull over.

These are workplaces to which workers bring staple items: a rucksack with food, makeup, clothes, towels. A parasol, wastebasket, extra plastic bags. A book to read, a thermos of coffee, sunscreen. I mention all this because anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution campaigns focus exclusively on the question of choice: whether any of these women really knew what selling sex would be like when they came to these highways from Rumania, Bulgaria or anywhere else. Whether they can be granted any agency at all, whether prostitution carries a transcendent meaning for feminism. Abstract questions rather than everyday culture in which individuals experience their own workaday lives. Looked at from this other viewpoint, it’s clear women treat these sites as workplaces, and that’s whether the person coming to pick them up after their shift is a friend or some kind of controller.

This isn’t a merely ethnographic value to be pooh-poohed by hard-hitting ideologues. To know about sex work you need to do more than think in the abstract. You need to look at what there is to look at, listen to the music and read more than tweets and policy-papers. Observing the workplace, even if you feel appalled that it’s out on a highway in the hot sun, allows you to see that the women are not only waiting passively as if with a whip over their heads but exercising small choices about their comfort.

The most ethereal of these pictures come from Txema Salvans, whose project The Waiting Game shows many more shots of sex workers along these highways.

Some of the chairs are not so portable after all, but I really like the empire-style fringed one above. The pictures also show that some workplaces are shared – and some chairs.

I’ve written about sexwork-places in Spain many times before, including:

Who are migrant sex workers?

The Sex Industry in Spain: Sex clubs, flats, agriculture, tourism

Sexwork and migration fiction, part 2: Jobs in the sex industry

—Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Back to Barcelona: Migration and Sex Work

In the late 90s I created an email listserv called Industria del Sexo for migrants and sex workers to discuss issues in any Romance language (excluding English was important). There were some academics but no journalists or politicians. Before social media and using the list, a few of us, Spanish and migrants alike, organised an event in Barcelona in 2002, to coincide with an industrial International AIDS conference. It took place in the Centre Cívic Pati Llimona, pictured above. Migration and Sex Work were on the agenda, and migrant sex workers definitely Spoke Out.

I’ll be at Pati Llimona again on 22 May, in a public event organised by Latin Americans in conjunction with the (also industrial) Latin American Studies Association conference (which I’m not attending). I’m in the panel of speakers that begins at 0945: Sexualidades y movilidades, where I’ll try to explain how feminism got so acrimoniously divided over prostitution and the results for migrants. The address is Calle Regomir 3 in the Barri Gòtic; more about the rest of the day on facebook

On 24 May I join Aprosex, Asociación de Profesionales del Sexo, in an event held at TicTac, Calle Santa Dorotea 9, not far from Plaça d’Espanya. Note this is a conversatorio, not me giving a planned talk. Questions to be discussed can be submitted on scraps of paper and later hands raised in hopes of a livelier event (specially for me).

Otherwise, I’m planning to walk my feet off in my usual solitary fashion, flaneur that I have always been. I’ll  enjoy the odd copa here and there, including, amazingly, with a couple of women who were there in 2002. If you know anyone who’d be interested in either of these events, please let them know.

—Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Grid girls and the Presidents Club: Women and sexist jobs

In 1995, my friend’s 17-year-old daughter Ermina was looking for work in Santiago, Chile. The obvious job available to her was posing in a short skirt beside cars or washing machines in public showrooms – standard promotional technique to this day. What made her hesitate? Girls who took those jobs in Santiago were assumed to be loose – no better than they should be. She might ruin her reputation whether she went on to do more than pose or not. There were also jobs in coffee bars, but they carried an even graver stigma. But Ermina didn’t want to follow in the footsteps of her mother and aunt, who had both migrated to Madrid to work as live-in maids. This was the kind of story I ran into everywhere in Latin America amongst poorer people back in the 90s, and is why I ended up writing Sex at the Margins.

Recently jobs like these have been in the news in the context of the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment but they also appear in long-running campaigns against prostitution and trafficking. All objections are increasingly positioned as evidence of Gender Inequality. I thought about writing this post after an event called the Presidents Club got undercoverage – a Financial Times reporter got a job as hostess. Scandal was provoked by revelations of the conditions of work for hostesses – conditions that have been conventional for aeons and most people know about. For those interested in labour rights, reports of low pay and a requirement to sign non-disclosure contracts stood out. For those who felt scandalised, it was having to wear skimpy frocks and accept being groped.

These jobs are widespread, because sexism is everywhere, because women without a lot of education and training have few options for work and because some women like hostess or modeling-type jobs better than whatever others are available. I understand why successful middle-class women denounce the existence of this work. I know this is objectification of women’s bodies and appearance, you don’t have to tell me. But what does it mean to call for their abolition except fewer jobs for women? And although the denouncers are appalled, many other women like or don’t much mind this way of making money.

The Presidents Club got much publicity because it’s an event for elite men. A class issue, as though those men ought to be better than others? Consider what happened ‘lower down’ the culture hierarchy.

Formula 1 ended its tradition of using grid girls because ‘it was at odds with modern societal norms‘.

The men drive the cars, they make the cars, they fix the cars and the women handed out drinks, refreshed the buffet… The grid girls would be led out, a bit like prize cattle, just before the race and stand on the grid where the cars are, with an umbrella or a number of which position the car was in. They would have their bottoms pinched by the mechanics, there would be photographers sat on the floor behind them, taking pictures of their bums, or up their skirts. They had to giggle and pretend that was OK. – broadcaster Beverley Turner

But grid girls protested.

Note the numbers for that tweet – and it wasn’t the only one, and Cooper wasn’t the only tweeter.

In the world of competitive darts, before this trend reports could say ‘stunning walk-on girls provide some much-needed glamour… The lovely ladies have the important job… to provide a key element to the festive entertainment.’

But now the Professional Darts Corporation announced it would end using walk-on girls who accompany players to the stage and hold up score cards. Announcing a protest in Birmingham, the owner of Dream Street Models and Events said, “If they’re banning us at F1 and darts, what’s next? Where’s it going to stop? Will it be boxing, Superbikes, the stands at NEC shows? Most of my models do promotional work, for some it’s a part-time job, but for others it’s their full-time living.”

The Women’s Sport Trust said: “We applaud the Professional Darts Corporation moving with the times and deciding to no longer use walk-on girls. Motor racing, boxing and cycling . . . your move.”

In parts of Asia beer girls (or promotion girls) are paid low wages to jolly male customers into ordering a particular brand of beer. Surviving from tips and working long into the night, they too have been named as improperly exploited by a funder.

The mostly young drink promoters are paid low wages — and work for tips, largely from groups of intoxicated men — to push certain beers in bars. Global Fund announced on Thursday in a statement that it was suspending its partnership with Heineken “based on recent reports of the company’s use of female beer promoters in ways that expose them to sexual exploitation and health risks”.

Exposed by hanging around drinking men and possibly having sex with them possibly for money that lifts them from survival-mode? A lot of women consider this a desirable job. Do you want to add ‘are forced to’ consider it desirable? Ok, but desire counts – don’t tell me you Know Better than they how they should feel and act.

Then there was MIPIM, an annual conference for property people that draws sex workers, an unremarkable fact that contributed to demands for more equality for female delegates at the conference.

Tamsie Thomson, the director of the London festival of architecture, said the Presidents Club scandal had “just scratched the surface of the discrimination and harassment that women and other minorities are routinely subjected to in our industry”. Thomson launched the “the elephant in the room” campaign to encourage women and others to challenge any inappropriate or uncomfortable behaviour and distributed pink elephant badges to raise awareness.

The event and sector are obviously mired in sexist practices, including holding events where only male delegates feel fully welcome. But there’s a disquieting tendency to imply that the fact sex workers might be there somewhere is evidence of Something Being Very Wrong. “What other industry on the face of the earth in 2018 needs to remind businessmen that they can’t bring prostitutes to an industry conference,” asked Jane, a 29-year-old delegate from Manchester. “That alone tells you how backward property is.” Do they imagine that getting rid of sex workers helps fix inequality problems? This leap to pointing at prostitution smacks of scapegoating.

As I lamented in The New Abolitionist Model, banning badly paid jobs because they are objectifying and sexist punishes women in contexts where they haven’t got many options.

Is the proposition still that being a servant for pennies and a scant private life is better because it is more dignified? Or is it superior simply because it is not sex work? Either way, to focus always on the moral aspects of sexual labor means forever sidelining projects to improve working conditions and legal protections.

Surely it’s obvious that more kinds of work for better pay need to exist before jobs women prefer are prohibited, even with the disadvantages they entail. There’s where this kind of feminist needs to put her energy, and that goes for richer and poorer countries alike.

Footnote: Nowadays the Santiago coffee bars are called cafés con piernas, cafes with legs, and (of course) are now named as sites of sex exploitation. The photo at the top shows one example.

And, in case anyone thought this phenomenon is always gender-specific, see this photo by Bill Kobrin of the Art Students League Dream Ball, New York, 1953. Yes – the 1950s.

—Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Strike4Decrim on Women’s ‘Day’ Soho 8 March 2018

I was glad to be able to participate in the Strike4Decrim events on the evening of 8 March – International Women’s Day. In general I’m no fan of official ‘days’ to celebrate supposedly coherent groups: mothers, fathers, women. Inevitably the differences get smoothed out and mainstreamed, many feel excluded and some feel seriously annoyed. General ‘women’s gatherings had taken place earlier in the day in a straighter part of town, but although Soho is getting blander all the time, a little kinkiness remains.

Here’s me talking for five minutes at the start, before we marched. The photos are by Alexander Schulenburg, who approached me to say he liked my talk and later tweeted on the event. I also ran into sex workers met in other countries and other years and some I worked with as far back as 2005. I appreciate being reminded of the continuity and feeling surrounded (notes of my talk at the bottom).

Why call it a strike? The word is meant to recentre women’s work, specially invisible things like ‘caring’ and reproductive labour. The intention was to expand the concept of strike and ‘use tactics and perspectives that think about how we struggle at the point of production and reproduction’. By including a sex workers’ rights event on the day, what gets counted as a feminist issue was expanded. I was glad to be there, given lamentable histories of leaving sex workers out.

My notes for the five minutes

Rights movement stronger now – multiple groups but we work together better than we used to
Regular folks seem to understand the idea of labour rights better
But the hostility of the Establishment hasn’t improved – folks who work in government, whether politicians or Home Office
They pay too much attention to anti-prostitution activists, radical feminists

The other day a few former sex workers won a case in the High Court to remove the requirement to tell employers about past soliciting convictions. Good, right?
Problem is they won on the basis that they were coerced victims.
The judge said it was ‘greatly to their credit they had succeeded in removing themselves from prostitution’
Casual dispensing of morality by a male judge

If you want to know what patriarchy is – it’s this!
If you want to know what infantilisation is – it’s this: talking about women as wayward children to be patted on the head if they do as they’re told
It appears that to benefit from this small bit of decriminalisation you must repent of your sin of being a prostitute, otherwise you keep those convictions on your record
even though it is legal to sell sex in this country

The selling of sex is still firmly framed as a social evil in laws and regulations
Great distance between that and ideas about human rights, workers’ rights

Migrants, even if their presence is legal, are most likely to be called victims of trafficking if they come to police attention and are lucky if not deported

The kinds of freedoms and treatment most women take for granted are not granted to sex workers
Gatherings like this one are important – so we can see each other outside in the street caring about the same things
To me this fits the idea of ‘strike’

Not silence – NOISE

Police were also offered leaflets.

-Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

The New Abolitionist Model

The New Abolitionist Model

By Laura Agustín, was published in Jacobin Magazine 6 December 2017. I wrote this after reading Julie Bindel’s new book but my thoughts are about the whole anti-prostitution movement as it stands today, whether formulated by so-called radical feminists, Christian missionaries, lawmakers or Rescue Industry social workers. Many others have commented on specific falsehoods and distortions in this book: especially see social media. Links were added by Jacobin. I begin with

__________________________________________________________
Entry for an encyclopedia of feminism: The Sex Work Wars: Decades of acrimonious debate about the meaning of exchanging sex for money. Near-total disagreement about terms, definitions, causes, and effects, and how to measure the involved phenomena. Mutual incomprehension on cultural meanings of sex, sexual identity, and gender relations. Laws backed by politicians based on the supposed truth of one or the other view. Little improvement for those being discussed. Outgrowth of the Lesbian/Feminist Sex Wars of the 1980s.
_________________________________________________________

A new shot has been fired in the Sex Work Wars. Julie Bindel’s The Pimping of Prostitution calls for a return to more authentic beginnings, when, as she tells it, everyone involved in the 1960s women’s liberation movement was in thrall to a few shining leaders.

This version rings no bells for me. We were revolting against 1950s domestic ideology that told women to be quiet, feminine, and satisfied with making homes for men. The meaning of liberation was to figure out how to live on our own terms, and if we did read mimeographed newsletters from activists, we didn’t think we had to agree with them. We didn’t feel anyone was our leader. We talked together on the streets, in classrooms, in cafés. Everyone’s experiences counted.

In those conversations, prostitution was considered neither a central issue nor a terrible thing — or not more terrible than everything else we were coming to recognize as oppressive. We wanted to know why housework wasn’t paid and women were supposed to do all the childrearing. We wanted to define our own ways to enjoy sex. We used a new word, ”sexist.” I don’t recall attending a single formal meeting, but I have identified since that time as a feminist.

In this book, Bindel offers two things: cheers and brickbats. Those who agree with her get cheers, everyone else gets brickbats. Less subtle than boxing commentary that recognizes all good punches, this is a bitterness born of thwarting: Prostitution still exists. Millett and Dworkin have been betrayed. Someone must pay.

Nowadays in conversations about women’s rights, there’s widespread agreement about the need for more education, equal salaries, and better job opportunities. But bring up women’s physical bodies, and ideologies of femininity and patriarchy flash like wildfire. Intransigent conflict pursues contraceptionabortion, surrogacy and, perhaps above all, how women can and may consent to have sex. For radical feminists like Bindel, the insertion of money into a sexual relationship signifies no women can ever consent, even when they say they do.

News about women who sell sex has changed tone since publication in 2000 of the UN Protocol on Trafficking, although legal definitions are even now not fully agreed on. Media reports routinely confuse or use all available terms. Human trafficking is not distinguished from people-smuggling, borrowing money to migrate is called debt bondage, awful working conditions and child labor become modern slavery, and selling sex is renamed either sex trafficking or sex slavery. All sociocultural contexts are eliminated in favor of universalizing definitions. No interest is shown in considering how to improve working conditions. The result is to define women as victims in need of rescue, especially when they are selling sex.

In this context it’s not surprising that abolitionism should reemerge into the mainstream. Bindel calls hers the new abolition movement, misleadingly linking to Josephine Butler’s nineteenth-century campaigns to abolish government regulation of prostitution (not prostitution itself). Bindel rejects the aforementioned proliferation of terms: “Trafficking is merely a process in which some women and children are prostituted. Prostitution itself is the problem.” Which at least confirms a long-standing activist complaint regarding anti-trafficking campaigns: that the real object is prohibition of any woman from selling sex, anywhere, anytime.

Fear of trafficking is now used to justify a variety of repressive prostitution-policy regimes, including a law that bans the purchase of sex. First called the Swedish model, then the Nordic, this law, according to Bindel, can now be called the abolitionist model. The idea of this ban is to “End Demand,” on the theory that, if men were stopped from buying sex, women could not be exploited and would never sell sex. It is a ludicrously simplified market theory of supply and demand. Abolitionists claim the law decriminalizes the sale of sex by women (appropriating the central demand of the sex workers’ rights movement), failing to address what would happen to women’s income if there were no clients.

The book’s subtitle, Abolishing the Sex Work Myth, suggests it will prove there are no sex workers. Bindel names many countries she visited. She details the personal sufferings of women who hated selling sex: these are her heroes, and they come across as individuals. Representatives of the “pro-prostitution lobby,” on the contrary, are treated as a series of puppets, quoted to demonstrate their cynicism. Those who recognize the concept of agency as one reason to accept the existence of voluntary sex work are ridiculed as “choice” or “fun” feminists. We hear nothing from women who may not like sex work but continue doing it for their own good reasons.

Mud is slung at escort-agency managers, queer academics, gay libertarians, HIV/health NGOs, migration scholars, Amnesty International, and sex worker-led groups. The greatest wrath is reserved for funders like George Soros’s Open Society Foundations for daring to try to strengthen sex workers’ rights. Because she wants to obliterate all differences and discredit every conceivable source of opposition to radical feminist ideology, variety in types of sex work, degrees of management control, perceptions of autonomy, and amounts of money are dismissed out of hand. Canned summaries of a few moments in sex-worker-rights history are thrown in, but the entire international social movement is dismissed as a pimping “lobby.”

I am capable of reading works whose worldview I don’t like for research purposes, but this book defeated me. The table of contents looks rational, but each chapter consists of many short subsections that appear almost randomly placed. The style is bumpy and awkward, suggesting multiple writers and no editor. There’s no depth, nuance, or engagement with ideas.

And I found very little that might be called new, neither facts nor ideas. If the international abolitionist movement hoped this would be a new heavy weapon against enemies or a way to convince non-experts that sex work is an illusion, they will be shaking their heads in disappointment.

The worst of the contemporary abolitionist project is its failure to confront the question of options for women. Bindel feels Josephine Butler would be on her side? I feel she’d be on mine. At mid-nineteenth century Butler saw how few alternatives women had to achieve economic independence and did not advocate they should be deprived of the possibility of selling sex to survive.

As a scholar in the field, my question has never been whether selling sex is acceptable in moral or feminist terms. Instead I’ve focused on the fact that women everywhere have limited job options, and, when they are not well-educated or connected socially, those options generally reduce to low-paying, low-prestige work: street vending, home sewing, caring, cleaning, retail jobs, sweatshop labor, and selling sex. When the women are undocumented migrants the feasible options reduce to two: living in others’ families as maids or selling sex.

Given the low earnings of these occupations, it is hardly surprising that women who feel they can tolerate it do sex work instead. Less time spent working for more money means being able to support oneself, help others and still have time to take a walk or read a book. Sometimes sex workers get into relationships that don’t look good to outsiders. But what do abolitionists imagine women with few options will do if they are forced to stop sex work?

The old Magdalene Laundries and lock hospitals envisioned nothing better than domestic servitude for ”fallen women.” Is the proposition still that being a servant for pennies and a scant private life is better because it is more dignified? Or is it superior simply because it is notsex work? Either way, to focus always on the moral aspects of sexual labor means forever sidelining projects to improve working conditions and legal protections.

Bindel’s need to manifest indignation at the slightest deviance from a simplified ideology means readers get no distinctions between dastardly procurers, human rights groups, independent escorts, academic researchers, workers in massage parlors, and Hugh Hefner. We’re all the same thing. It’s the textbook definition of fundamentalism.

***

I’ve written previously about feminist fundamentalism in:
The Bad Vibrations of Anatomical Fundamentalism: World Gender War
Sex workers at AWID reject feminist fundamentalism
and Gunilla Ekberg, Sex War and Extremist Feminism.

-Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Paying for sex in Graham Greeneland: Sex work in fiction

womanblurLeiterThe other day I lightly said It’s a blokey thing to a young person who replied That’s a sexist thing to say! The next day another young person heard me use the word masculine and cried You’re a feminist! I take it ideas about sexism and feminism have extended their contradictory ways into small corners of ordinary life and think it funny I got accused of opposing sins on back-to-back days. Some of us don’t fit neatly into identity-categories, eh?

Couple-saying-goodbye-outside-the-Tube-station-entranceMost of the discourse about buying and selling sex focuses on the abstract question Is it Bad or Good? in one way or another. More interesting is anything that shows how diverse transactions are, how wide the field, how contradictory the possibilities, how unlikely the goal of an ethical bottom line. In the following vignette from Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair (1951) a commercial transaction is deeply embedded in context: World War II London, Clapham, the narrator’s love for a married woman, his obsessive jealousy. They have an argument and he walks out. It is May 1940.

That evening I was still full of my hatred and distrust when I reached Piccadilly. More than anything in the world I wanted to hurt Sarah. I wanted to take a woman back with me and lie with her upon the same bed in which I made love to Sarah; it was as though I knew that the only way to hurt her was to hurt myself. It was dark and quiet by this time in the streets, though up in the moonless sky moved the blobs and beams of the searchlights. You couldn’t see faces where the women stood in doorways and at the entrances of the unused shelters. They had to signal with their torches like glow-worms. All the way up Sackville Street the little lights went on and off. I found myself wondering what Sarah was doing now. Had she gone home or was she waiting on the chance of my return?

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A woman flashed on her light and said, ‘Like to come home with me, dear?’ I shook my head and walked on. Further up the street a girl was talking to a man: as she lit up her face for him, I got a glimpse of something young, dark and happy and not yet spoiled: an animal that didn’t yet recognise her captivity. I passed and then came back up the road towards them; as I approached the man left her and I spoke. ‘Like a drink?’ I said.
‘Coming home with me afterwards?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll be glad of a quick one.’
We went into the pub at the top of the street and I ordered two whiskies, but as she drank I couldn’t see her face for Sarah’s. She was younger than Sarah, she couldn’t have been more than nineteen, more beautiful, one might even have said less spoiled, but only because there was so much less to spoil: I found I no more wanted her than I wanted the company of a dog or a cat. She was telling me that she had a nice flat on the top floor only a few houses down; she told me what rent she had to pay and what her age was and where she was born and how she had worked for a year in a café. She told me she didn’t go home with anybody who spoke to her, but she could see at once I was a gentleman. She said she had a canary called Jones named after the gentleman who had given it her. She began to talk of the difficulty of getting groundsel in London. I thought: if Sarah is still in my room I can ring up. . .
Looking at her over my whisky I thought how odd it was that I felt no desire for her at all. It was as if quite suddenly after all the promiscuous years I had grown up. My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust for ever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.
And yet surely it was not love that had brought me into this pub; I had told myself all the way from the Common that it was hate, as I tell myself still, writing this account of her, trying to get her out of my system for ever, for I have always told myself that if she died, I could forget her.
I went out of the pub, leaving the girl with her whisky to finish and a pound-note as a salve to her pride, and walked up New Burlington Street as far as a telephone-box. I had no torch with me and was forced to strike match after match before I could complete the dialling of my number. Then I heard the ringing tone and I could imagine the telephone where it stood on my desk and I knew exactly how many steps Sarah would have to take to reach it if she were sitting in a chair or lying on the bed. And yet I let it go on ringing in the empty room for half a minute. — The End of the Affair, pp 57-59

Now try to reduce the narrator’s interaction with a woman he picks up on the street to the question Is it Good or Bad?

This post is part of a series on sex work in fiction. Scroll backwards to May 2017 and see the Related Items appearing below this post. I’ve contributed to this production with The Three-Headed Dog, a noir novel about Latin American migrants in Spain.

-Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Social-Problem novels and The Three-Headed Dog

StokeNewingtonFeb2017I was interviewed in an old pub in Stoke Newington next to a photo-plaque memorialising Writers and Reformers.* I suppose it was by chance, but maybe not.

Campaigners for equal rights and other freedoms don’t talk about reform anymore, but if it’s not revolution they want then technically it is reform. According to this western worldview, we are moving in a stream of time called Progress towards – something if not Utopia then always fairer, healtheir and wealthier all the time.

In the 19th century in northern Europe and North America, there was a movement of writers to expose social injustices through novels, with the goal of reform. They thought that if more people knew about injustices wrought upon the poor, women and children, then readers might add to pressure on government elites to reform laws. It was consciousness-raising about the suffering of others: The books were aimed at middle-class readers.

2940012004093_p0_v1_s260x420Protest novel, social novel thesis novel, propaganda novel, industrial novel, working-class/proletarian novel, condition-of-England novel: all describe the works of writers including Mary Gaskell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens and, in the 20th century, John Steinbeck, James Baldwin, Nadine Gordimer and many more.

Critics argue about whether their social visions portrayed the truth and whether the authors really blamed structural problems or were more interested in individual character. On the literary front, too much protest can work against story-telling and other aesthetic qualities, leading to criticism about the novels being insufficiently literary. Other distinctions include

The value of Condition-of-England novels lies primarily not in their fictional plots, social analyses, and recommended solutions but primarily in first-hand detailed observations of industrialism, urbanism, class, and gender conflicts. – The Victorian Web

I’m not a fan of drawing lines to distinguish between Real Art and everything else; I think you can have activist purpose and write beautifully at the same time, just as you can write nicely and have nothing much to say. The observations you make may feel significant to readers or not. Trends of the moment play a part: at the particular time in which I’m writing this, critics may introduce the idea of Cultural Appropriation, which suggests that outsiders should not write about social injustices they have not themselves lived.

sinclair - jungle bindingTo protest it may be enough to produce a portrait of how bad things are. To believe that reform is possible you need to be clear about what would constitute improvement. A novel about children forced to work in satanic mills might call for better working conditions for them or, alternatively, claim their right not to work at all but rather be allowed to enjoy ‘childhood’. To qualify as a reform-novel you may need to propose concrete solutions that can be formed into laws.

Agustin-TheThreeHeadedDog-14001-250x400The Three-Headed Dog portrays life in underground economies amongst undocumented migrants, smugglers and sex workers, in a particular time and place: Spain in the early 21st century. After observing events surrounding undocumented migration and prostitution law for so many years, I got tired of being annoyed by the pontificating on policy and morals from people who seemed not to know many realities. To participate in mainstream debates one is pretty well forced to accept the framework of whoever’s funding the event or publication. The frameworks are never what I would choose myself.

Writing stories is a way to show how things are without being caught up in these alien frames. It is also a way to portray some of my own life, what I look at and care about. But not with avid activist purpose: in my case it’s about allowing ideas to float up from the depths and shape themselves into readable stories. Without calculating if they will be saleable, not taking advice about how to spin the ideas so they’re more palatable to policymakers or listening to the many well-meaning intermediaries who have counseled me to change things.

In the early years after Sex at the Margins came out I tried to talk about how labour policy might be linked to migration policy here and now (in the European Union and everywhere else). Seldom did interviewers follow this up, asking instead for me to rate competing prostitution laws (oversimplified into decriminalisation, ‘legalisation’ and penalisation of buying sex). Since then, policies on undocumented migration and what’s called trafficking have worsened.

But I resist. Resistance is still an option, the refusal to accept alien framings, perhaps the concept of debate itself. I wouldn’t call The Three-Headed Dog a Social-Problems Novel, but not because it’s written inside a crime or noir genre. I’d say rather because I don’t propose policies that might improve the wretched mess. At this moment I want more of the realities to come out – in a fuller form, with space for anthropological observation and literary emotion. So that a few readers somewhere may see into lives they otherwise never get to hear about. [This leads to ideas about what Education is, but enough for now.]

* In the pub plaque: Samuel Rogers, Anne Laetitia Barbauld, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Howard, Edgar Allen Poe and Dr Isaac Watts (none a known social-problem novelist)

-Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Thinking about sex work as work: Dublin Anarchist Book Fair

WSMbookfairtalkI gave a talk called Thinking about sex work as work on 6 April 2013 at the Dublin Anarchist Book Fair. Local abolitionists and anti-prostitution folks were attacking my being there, which is reflected in my introductory remarks. I wrote about wanting the opportunity to talk about sex work without -isms (theory, ideology, rules of thought).

Later I found out the sound deteriorated in the recording I uploaded to my little Youtube channel, and I don’t have a handyperson to fix things like that. Then the other day, while searching for something quite different, I found a clear recording and the person who made it: Aubrey Robinson‏ (@andyazi on twitter). He kindly sent it to me and I’ve uploaded it to the channel.

I haven’t listened to it again and make no claim to be definitive. This is maybe a good case of the personal being political. More rigorously I wrote Sex as Work and Sex Work for The Commoner.

Photo Ahmad Nimer

When I sent this recently to a facebook-man who seemed curious his reply was No, wrong, you can’t talk about sex work without addressing the stigma. I said he should consider before launching into mansplaining in a place where sex workers themselves exchange ideas. He said Fuck that (subject-status doesn’t give knowledge priority, and so on). I said I understand. I don’t think he grasped the nuance – that he had confirmed the mansplaining. Point is, in 30 minutes the plate is full just trying to talk about sex work as work, without the reams of Other Prostitution Issues including stigma, moralising, poverty, agency and everything else on the planet.

I uploaded this video only a while ago and boom, the first comment asks Where are their parents? What do they think? See last line, previous paragraph. Jeez.

There are four other videos on my channel.

-Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sweden and prostitution law: the conditions of possibility

redup2The idea of criminalising the purchase of sex continues to be promoted round the world, usually as part of some politician’s campaign against immoral sex and the exploitation of children, with a subtext aimed at keeping women at home and migrants out. Sweden’s law is thrown out as the model, along with claims that prostitution is practically absent and trafficking nearly non-existent there. Neither of these has been proven. To explore this sort of claim, see tags to the right of this post (sweden, nordic model, laws, gender equality, for example.)

The banning-sex-purchase proposal has been made in countries as far away from Sweden as Brazil and India. Presented abstractly it sounds clear, simple and righteous. But local context and history make a big difference in how a proposed law can come to pass and operate on the ground (as opposed to in starry rhetoric). The Swedish context is unusual in the world, the conditions making this law (sexköpslagen) possible difficult to imagine outside the Nordic region. Nothing slapdash nor sudden was involved but rather deep history in a particular culture. This is not true of other countries that jump on the bandwagon because some politicians see their chance to make names based on simplistic moralising.

The following is an excerpt from a longer article I published a few months ago on the dysfunction of prostitution laws, the idea of whore stigma and the disqualification and actual murder of sex workers. For those who ask Where did the Swedish model come from? How could feminism have led to it? this provides a short version of what might be called an épistème – the epistemological field forming the conditions of possibility for knowledge in a given time and place.

Sweden and prostitution (from Prostitution Law and the Death of Whores, Jacobin, 15 August 2013)

The population of only nine and a half million is scattered over a large area, and even the biggest city is small. In Sweden’s history, social inequality (class differences) was early targeted for obliteration; nowadays most people look and act middle-class. The mainstream is very wide, while social margins are narrow, most everyone being employed and/or supported by various government programmes. Although the Swedish utopia of Folkhemmet – the People’s Home – was never achieved, it survives as a powerful symbol and dream of consensus and peace. Most people believe the Swedish state is neutral if not actually benevolent, even if they recognize its imperfections.

After the demise of most class distinctions, inequality based on gender was targeted (racial/ethnic differences were a minor issue until recent migration increases). Prostitution became a topic of research and government publications from the 1970s onwards. By the 1990s, eradicating prostitution came to be seen as a necessary condition for the achievement of male-female equality and feasible in a small homogeneous society. The solution envisioned was to prohibit the purchase of sex, conceptualized as a male crime, while allowing the sale of sex (because women, as victims, must not be penalized). The main vehicle was not to consist of arrests and incarcerations but a simple message: In Sweden we don’t want prostitution. If you are involved in buying or selling sex, abandon this harmful behavior and come join us in an equitable society.

Since the idea that prostitution is harmful has infused political life for decades, to refuse to accept such an invitation can appear misguided and perverse. To end prostitution is not seen as a fiat of feminist dictators but, like the goal to end rape, an obvious necessity. To many, prostitution also seems incomprehensibly unnecessary in a state where poverty is so little known.

These are the everyday attitudes that social workers coming into contact with Eva-Maree probably shared. We do not know the details of the custody battle she had been locked in for several years with her ex-partner. We do not know how competent either was as a parent. She recounted that social workers told her she did not understand she was harming herself by selling sex. There are no written guidelines decreeing that prostitutes may not have custody of their children, but all parents undergo evaluations, and the whore stigma could not fail to affect their judgements. For the social workers, Eva-Maree’s identity was spoiled; she was discredited as a mother on psycho-social grounds. She had persisted in trying to gain mother’s rights and made headway with the authorities, but her ex-partner was enraged that an escort could gain any rights and did all he could to impede her seeing them. The drawn-out custody process broke down on the day she died, since standard procedures do not allow disputing parents to meet during supervised visits with children.

In a 2010 report evaluating the law criminalizing sex-purchase, stigma is mentioned in reference to feedback they received from some sex workers:

The people who are exploited in prostitution report that criminalization has reinforced the stigma of selling sex. They explain that they have chosen to prostitute themselves and feel they are not being involuntarily exposed to anything. Although it is not illegal to sell sex they perceive themselves to be hunted by the police. They perceive themselves to be disempowered in that their actions are tolerated but their will and choice are not respected.

The report concludes that these negative effects “must be viewed as positive from the perspective that the purpose of the law is indeed to combat prostitution.” To those haunted by the death of Eva-Maree, the words sound cruel, but they were written for a document attempting to evaluate the law’s effects. Evaluators had been unable to produce reliable evidence of any kind of effect; an increase in stigma was at least a consequence.

Has this stigma discouraged some women from selling sex who might have wanted to and some men from buying? Maybe, but it is a result no evaluation could demonstrate. The report, in its original Swedish 295 pages, is instead composed of historical background, repetitious descriptions of the project and administrative detail. Claims made later that trafficking has diminished under the law are also impossible to prove, since there are no pre-law baseline statistics to compare to.

The lesson is not that Sweden’s law caused a murder or that any other law would have prevented it. Whore stigma exists everywhere under all prostitution laws. But Sweden’s law can be said to have given whore stigma a new rationality for social workers and judges, the stamp of government approval for age-old prejudice. The ex-partner’s fury at her becoming an escort may derive in part from his Ugandan background, but Sweden did not encourage him to view Eva-Maree more respectfully.

Some say her murder is simply another clear act of male violence and entitlement by a man who wanted her to be disqualified from seeing their children. According to that view, the law is deemed progressive because it combats male hegemony and promotes Gender Equality. This is what most infuriates advocates of sex workers’ rights: that the “Swedish model” is held up as virtuous solution to all of the old problems of prostitution, in the absence of any evidence. But for those who embrace anti-prostitution ideology, the presence or absence of evidence is unimportant.

***

Some of the immediate questions you might have, for instance on Gender Equality and State Feminism, are addressed in the full essay Prostitution Law and the Death of Whores. This kind of background is, of course, not interesting to everyone, and most of what I see on the topic talks about the law as Bad or Good. Discussions typical in parliamentary committees like the Irish are silly because they opt to accept banal lists of supposed successes in Sweden without acknowledging the difficulties of knowing effects at all. Activists on both sides tend to over-state their cases – practically the definition of much activism in social movements. For anyone interested in history, though, the background is crucial, and it can be seen as good news that it’s not so easy to simply transfer the logic of a law from one country to another: that kind of homogenised culture is not here yet.

Proof of the law’s effects are mostly unknowable so far. The state’s evaluation of the law in 2010 admitted ignorance of how to investigate commercial sex online and gave numbers only for street prostitution. This was a tiny number to begin with describing an activity that is diminishing. Claims that sex trafficking have decreased are meaningless since no baseline statistics were kept on this before the law was passed. The claims of eradicating either phenomenon are public-relations trivia. That politicians in other countries reproduce these claims in supposedly serious hearings demonstrates mediocrity and lack of interest in the subject. As I said above, the principle effect we can be sure of is

Sweden’s law can be said to have given whore stigma a new rationality for social workers and judges, the stamp of government approval for age-old prejudice.

Increases in stigma, social death and excuses to disqualify women who sell sex as autonomous beings are dire effects to a piece of legislation that emerged from a goal to achieve Gender Equality. Utopian visions can backfire, and this one has.

For another of my views of Sweden’s present State Feminists see Extremist Feminism in Swedish government: Something Dark

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Women doing things again, on their own

fernandocoelhoGirlsYear beginning, low light and infantilising coverage of women combine to make me feel a bit lost for words but full of desire to publish pictures that resist the miserablism. Some of the women portrayed are probably offering sex for sale, but be careful about stereotyping when you imagine which ones they are. The exercise is to look not at whatever ‘patriarchal structures’ or economic problems push women into doing one thing or another but to see them as playing the cards they were dealt.

lesbianI avoid the language of choice, and the term agency is unfriendly but it’s what I mean. This is not about identities or job titles but existing in and moving through the world. It’s also not about love or family in any obvious sense or anyone’s nationality or what culture they were brought up in. Look elsewhere for downtrodden, caged, unhappy, passive, immobile victims with mouths bandaged so they cannot speak. I ran a bunch of photos a couple of times some years back – see Women Doing Things.

I suppose they are a peek into my subconscience, too. Anyway, happy 2014.

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Wimmin$prostitutes-demo-1914

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old women on bench

street

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–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

What does the French prostitution law mean? Denial of consent

Borgen Season 3 Ep 25

At a conference on Sexual Citizenship and Human Rights the other week, I binned the talk I had prepared and instead gave a version of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. It turned out both the other speakers on the panel were to address trafficking, one as a straightforward Rescue-Industry member, and I’m not capable of watching an innocent audience listen to that stuff without speaking up.

My new talk was called Denial of Consent, because previously at this event consent was mentioned continuously as a key human-rights concept in European sexuality law. How telling, then, that European specialists declaim adolescents’ right to consent to have sex at the same time that other Europeans declaim ever more often that most adult women and trans who sell sex have not consented. In anti-trafficking campaigns the claim is very often that these victims cannot speak/have no voice giving an excuse for others to ‘speak for’ them.

In Prostitution Law and the Death of Whores I focussed on the mechanism by which Rescuers – feminists, social workers, politicians, police – discredit what adult women say about their experiences of selling sex, thus disqualifying them as subjects in a discussion about their own fates. What they say varies widely, of course, but rather than engage in seeking policy that would allow individual experiences to become central and rather than listening with interest to what sexworker activists say and finding migrants to talk to, they claim to Know Better how they should think and feel. The mainstream television series Borgen included a scene in which the non-sexworker experts on a Copenhagen panel discussion of prostitution interrupt and scoff at the sole sexworker participant, demonstrating how well-known the mechanism of disqualification has become (photo above from Season 3, Episode 25). Refusal to believe in the consent of women who sell sex also contradicts widespread anti-rape campaigning that puts consent at the core of sexual relationships.

The law to be voted in France’s Assemblée today (4 December 2013) is the product of years of process and politicking, not only in France but in certain feminist networks in Europe. In April 2011 I wrote Europe’s anti-prostitution initiatives multiply: EU itself and now France, linking developments to the European Women’s Lobby campaign for A Europe Free from Prostitution. Last month I wrote, with Thierry Schaffauser, about how the testimony of sexworker activists have been deliberately disqualified from consideration by politicians and certain feminists in France. This is accomplished by claiming these activists are a privileged elite selfishly putting their own interests above those victims of sex trafficking said to be ‘voiceless’ and requiring others to speak for them. Alice Schwarzer, currently campaigning against Germany’s law regulating prostitution, referred to them recently as ‘a few cheerful prostitutes’, of no consequence compared to the miserable 95%.

It’s now 20 years since I first wondered how this refusal to listen operates, at a time when I lived far from Europe amongst very poor women, many of whom were thinking about travelling to Europe. Some already sold sex at home, many were thinking of doing it abroad, others did not want to sell sex but work as live-in maids. This means that my first thoughts and feelings were attached to a specific real-life situation in which I had no axe to grind, no interest one way or the other. In terms of research on women who sell sex I even had what can be called a control group – women of the same cohort who didn’t sell sex. I was unaware a conflict existed within feminism on the topic, I hadn’t read books about prostitution. I was just as interested in what women said about being maids, and I still am. I’ve commented frequently on how my original research question, before I knew what research was, really, concerned the presumption by middle-class women that they Knew Better than sex workers what they should do with their lives. When I studied for a Master’s and then a doctoral degree my focus was never on migrants but on people wanting to rescue them, and after some six or seven years I felt I had answered my original question in several ways. Read Sex at the Margins for details.

I have followed events closely in Europe now for 15 years, living in several different countries and visiting many others, sometimes for extended stays. France is a country I have known since a first school trip from London to Calais, maybe in 1961, and since then I have spent a lot of time there. So i closely watched the action in France’s Assemblée last Friday – not the rhetoric, which I know by heart, but the tones and nuances of speech by the proponents of the law. The auditorium was nearly empty, but all politicking was over; what happened on the floor was not debate but the formal rhetoric of presenting a proposition. Any suggestion from the opposition that the law was sloppily conceived was rebutted with arch-seriousness about how long and carefully proponents had worked on it. The media were accused of missing the point, said to be not penalising clients but protecting women who sell sex.

I do understand what Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, France’s Minister for Women’s Rights, wants to do. I’ve studied in depth what this one kind of feminism wants to achieve, i see how marvellous it sounds – a world without prostitution, a France in which State Feminism takes a daring step towards Gender Equality. Vallaud-Belkacem herself is a very different face for abolitionism from the more embittered and older radical feminists we’ve become used to: Gunilla Eckberg, Melissa Farley, Janice Raymond, Alice Schwarzer and others in every country. She is younger, prettier and was born in a colony, Morocco. French campaigneers have not leant on anti-trafficking rhetoric but on the classic idea that prostitution is a patriarchal institution that must be abolished – the arguments I read when I first started my formal studies in the late 90s. Unfounded numbers of trafficking victims are thrown out, yes, but I read the French effort as being more serious than that. The thing is neither slapdash nor hysterical but part of a sober attempt to change the European panorama, to shift the gaze from small-population Nordic countries never seen as important European players to the continent, to France – to the heart of real Europe. I see this shift as game-changing.

On the other hand, the reason i wrote Sex at the Margins still holds; nothing has improved for sex workers or for people called trafficked or for undocumented migrants in Europe. The anti-trafficking movement has diverted attention and money into everything but benefiting the women pitied in the first place. Campaigners have yet to comprehend how migrants, and a lot of other women, feel about doing high-stigma, risky, better-paying jobs – especially when the other options are practically non-existent. Rescuers’ fundamental project insists on the need to force people into leading lives considered better. It would appear they are incapable of imagining that others are different from themselves, that migrants perceive their options on the basis of their own life experiences and goals. The question is much bigger than Do you like selling sex? rather it is how the range of an individual’s needs, from sleeping patterns to children’s school schedules and the desire for consumer goods may lead them to prefer selling sex to everything else Rescuers can offer. In fact they offer little, which victims and non-victims alike understand.

Few sex workers are attracted by ‘exit strategies’ or ‘diversion programmes’. They hate being low-paid, disparaged, disrespected cleaners, nannies and maids. They don’t want to return to their countries as failed migrants. They don’t want to be poorer again. The sex act may be something they adapt to, learn to enjoy or close their eyes and endure, but if doing it provides more freedom, autonomy, flexibility or hope then it can be preferred, whether people were born in France, China, Nigeria or Brazil. The majority have consented to sell sex, somehow or other, to some degree. Insisting that they leave the milieu when there is so little to offer them is the opposite of kind. In the Rescue Industry protagonists are those who appoint themselves to ‘accompany’ victims out of the life, not those being saved. The consent of adult women is denied en masse.

The French law, apart from the fine of 1500€ for clients arrested the first time, is all about Rescue. The frame is France does not welcome prostitution, meaning prostitution must cease to exist there. It’s estimated at least 80% of sex workers in France moved there from somewhere else, some with the right to remain and look for other jobs. Other migrants are offered 336€ a month for six months if they promise to stop selling sex; since this is far from enough to live on it’s obviously hoped they will leave more quickly, moving to someone else’s country, putting the proposition in the NIMBY tradition – Not in My Back Yard. Street soliciting, outlawed by Sarkozy in 2003 but for many years tolerated or enforced unevenly in different cities, would be permitted again. The law’s backers claim this to be a kind step, but street sex workers say clients will only insist on going to less accessible, more dangerous places to have sex. Besides, local ordinances against street soliciting can be and have been passed at the city level; Lyon is an example.

Logistically the law was informally voted on last Friday. Today is the formal vote. If it passes it is sent to the Sénat, where two scenarios are possible: It passes and goes into effect or it is rejected and sent back to the Assemblée with amendments. In the latter case, the Assemblée vote on a new version that goes back to the Sénat. If the Sénat reject that, a commission paritaire would be named, half from the Sénat, half from the l’Assemblée. The version produced by this commission would then be voted on by the Assemblée, who have the last word. (Thanks to Morgane Merteuil of STRASS for clarifying this process. See their website for other information).

I have loads of links to videos and articles I’ll try to put up soon.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Fallen Women: persistence of an image

A new film about staging La Traviata is using the most old-fashioned and clichéd image in its publicity: that of Violetta on the floor in the classic pose of Fallen Women. Yes, I know the opera and I know the novel it’s based on (La dame aux camélias 1848) and I am capable of appreciating romantic imagery and tradition. But to choose just this pathetic and highly charged pose to advertise a supposedly innovative film seems perverse and uncreative to me.

I’ve written before about the iconography of the Fallen Woman: her position on the ground, sometimes twisted, sometimes being reached out to by a kind person (usually a man). In La Traviata (1853) Violetta is dying of consumption, so she’s also seen in pathetic poses in bed, but using the floor image in publicity photos drives home the idea that her essence is this: morally low, a kept woman, demi-mondaine, courtesan or woman

who’s gone astray (traviata). At the beginning of the story Violetta is a happy-go-lucky good-time girl (though ill). Finding true love with Alfredo she is portrayed as morally redeemed and self-sacrificing.

Possibly the gay lady may come to the ‘bitter end’ some day, but at present, except from the moral point of view, she is not an object for commiseration. She at least has all that she deliberately bargains for—fine clothes, rich food, plenty of money, a carriage to ride in, the slave-like obedience of her ‘inferiors’, and the ful­some adulation of those who deal with her for her worth. Very often (though under the circumstances it is doubtful if from any aspect this is an advantage) she finds a fool with money who is willing to marry her; but whether she is content to accept the decent change, and to abide by it, of course depends on her nature. – James Greenwood, The Seven Curses of London, Curse IV: Fallen Women, 1869

Whether the staging is brought into the present or not, Violetta always has a scene on the floor to drive home her moral abjection. Why else would she be on the floor? People who fall get back up right away; if they can’t, they are too injured. In Violetta’s case the injury is moral. Of course people also play on the floor, but Violetta is not playing in these scenes.

A limp Violetta can signify death but also helplessness, unconsciousness, submissiveness, despite the fact that she is tremendously strong both before and after redemption through love. In the beginning she is so good at gaiety that everyone around her has fun. Later she remains faithful to Alfredo despite his father’s meanness and sacrifices her own happiness for her lover. I dislike this plot, but there is no doubt Violetta is not a limp rag of a woman.

Observe the similar pose used to portray a woman hypnotised by Charcot: drooping, weak, the passive object of every male student’s gaze. She was diagnosed as suffering from ‘hysteria’, considered to be a sexual dysfunction at the time (1885). If he were not holding her up, she would fall to the ground. I personally wish all these images of traditional passive femininity would stop being used by anyone in the present, especially someone making the film of an opera and story full of other possibilities.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Intellectual influence (or grooming, if you feel paranoid)

Recently I was accused of ‘academic grooming’ by someone disappointed that everyone who writes and talks about sex does not agree with her. The idea of grooming isn’t developed but interests me. It means preparing someone for a specific purpose, but in the world of concern about sexual abuse grooming is the process by which a victim is manipulated into a sexual relationship. To use the word about teachers or writers and students, university students have to be seen as so passive and gullible they unquestioningly accept everything they hear and read (only on the subject of sex?) and then become – what? practitioners of the perversion? This is puzzling, since no amount of narrow-mindedness can prevent students from hearing contradictory opinions about every topic all the time. Well, maybe it isn’t like that in some religious schools, I don’t know.

After I published Dear Students of Sex Work and Trafficking, one student wrote to me:

I was moved by your recent post regarding students. I am studying for a masters degree in sociology at the university of Copenhagen. For a couple of years i have followed your blog with great interest.

Last semester i did a project where we interviewed migrant women selling sexual services in Denmark. Your blog, articles and of course your book was a great inspiration as to how we approached the subject.
Because of your work, we were inspired to use feminist standpoint epistemology as a starting point. You also inspired us to be critical to our own positions.

If it was not for your expertise and work, we would probably have produced a boring paper repeating nasty stereotypes and neglecting the voices of women in marginalized positions. Actually, i really doubt we could have produced a paper without you. I doubt we would have been able to arrange interviews without being aware of various issues which you have highlighted in your book.

I am basically writing in order to thank you, and to let you know, that there are some students who do not expect you to do our work or anwer stupid questions.

So thank you Laura!

I wrote and thanked him for this message of support and got his permission to publish it here.

Remember those students in Basel that heard Catharine MacKinnon on prostitution one day and me the next? They may have felt quite disoriented or confused but then perhaps had to think for themselves and make up their own minds about the issues – a good thing, on my view. I’m optimistic about people’s ability to figure things out, including girls and young women like those a man is possibly observing closely in the Lewis Hine photo. I also take a conservative view about the power of my words to affect those who hear or read them. I remember, however, the gender-studies expert at Sussex who told me it was irresponsible of me to talk the way I do.

Anyway, the idea of academic grooming seems to be another example of psy concepts twisted and imposed to suit the needs of campaigners – like justifying resistance to rescue or rehabilitation as Stockholm syndrome or brainwashing.

The complaint ends I really do despair for young people today. Heavens, as long as amateur psychobabble is allowed, I’d like to suggest that such a statement is paranoid, seeing demons and dragons where only opinions exist – not to mention a failure to believe in university students to think and make judgements.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist