sexwork

En España están hablando de nuevo de prohibir los anuncios de contacto con trabajadores sexuales - o prostitutas/os (y a veces conocidos como avisos de putas). Un artículo desde Tenerife expone los diversos argumentos pro y contra. El 20 Minutos acusa a los demás periódicos del proxenetismo. Malaprensa deconstuye cuidadosamente las cifras enormes siempre citadas sobre el número de prostitutas en España.

La voz de la libertad de expresión dice Partiendo de la base de que ejercer voluntariamente la prostitución no es delito en España, no veo ningún inconveniente en que una persona, haciendo uso de su libertad, se anuncie en un periódico para prestar ese servicio (Leopoldo Fernández Cabeza de Vaca).

Pero claro que la trata sí es ilegal y los que hacen campaña en contra de los anuncios argumentan que no son las trabajadoras sexuales las que se anuncian sino las mafias. El mismo presidente Zapatero se ha pronunciado en contra: no le conviene nada el hecho de que España es el único país de la Unión Europea que todavía permite que los periódicos dominantes-principales publiquen estos anuncios. Atrás está una feminista estatal, Bibiana Aído, ministra de la Igualdad. Es una historia emblemática de la Europa contemporánea.

Al mismo tiempo algo similar está pasando en Estados Unidos pero que tiene impacto para cualquier sitio con Internet - o sea, para todo el mundo. Craigslist, un enorme sitio web de anuncios clasificados, queda acusado del ‘tráfico’ por personas y fiscales estatales que creen que se está utilizando el servicio para explotar a los niños. Escribí sobre esto ayer.

Running a website with erotic advertisements as sex trafficking: the mind boggles at how anything connected to the sex industry can now be given the scary label trafficking.

In the USA, where Craigslist is headquartered, the website’s advertisements for paid sex are causing a furore amongst moral entrepreneurs who want the ads stopped on the grounds that ‘child sex trafficking’ is going on. Craigslist and the sex trade shows a cnn reporter attempting to make the owner of Craigslist himself personally responsible, pointing at ads, challenging him to explain. Some of this resembles scapegoating, the desire to find a single responsible villain for a Great Social Evil, implying that stopping this advertising would be a significant battle against it.

The fear fueling this campaign is captured in one NGO’s statement that An estimated 100,000-300,000 American children are at risk for becoming victims of commercial sexual exploitation. This figure is not even an irresponsibly extrapolated number of victims, which we are now used to, but an estimate of how many might be vulnerable. The cnn reporter describes the torso-photo in one ad as young-looking. Such imaginings are not the basis for policy! And note that where there would have been a distinction in terms not long ago (commercial sexual exploitation v trafficking), now there is not. Everything becomes trafficking.

The argument against stopping all commercial sex ads centres on freedom of expression/information, a key principle in human rights law. This principle takes in written, oral and print media, including the Internet, and covers not only the content but the means of expression. Of course there are situations meant to override this freedom, nowadays usually called Hate Speech, the Harm Principle and the Offence Principle. One could certainly make a strong argument that sex ads are harmful if one could prove that all those running them were criminals forcing other people to perform sex acts against their will. To do that would require real evidence, not panicky guesses about young victims. Not scare tactics.

Another aspect of this crusade is about something else: the ‘accusation’ that Craigslist is like Wal-Mart. This appears to be hostility both to big profits and a comparison with Wal-Mart’s unadorned, high-volume, warehouse-like style. Or perhaps it refers more to Wal-Mart’s legendary lack of social consciousness, poor community relations, environmental disinterest, use of badly paid foreign labour and so on. The problem is: Wal-Mart is also enormously popular. Would a personalised boutique style make Craigslist more acceptable?

Some of the ads on Craigslist might be the work of bad people. The ways they might be bad range from taking too much of the money a worker earns right through to kidnapping and slavery. But should the possibility that bad things could happen be allowed to justify shutting down all the ads, including those placed by competent adults? See Amanda Brooks on that.

Classified adverts are the subject of a similar crusade in Spain at the moment. In that case, mainstream newspapers are the accused businesses, but the issue is just the same.

When Augusta licensed its prostitutes

by Bill Kirby at The Augusta Chronicle

Augusta was booming in 1941. A military buildup had downtown streets swelling with soldiers from the nearby Army camp. . . ‘The soldiers want girls and are going to get them.’ Regulation, he concluded was the only practical solution. ‘The problem of prostitution in army camp towns cannot be solved by the moral indignation of good citizens. The traffic cannot be eradicated in a city of Augusta’s size even in normal times, let alone when 20,000 or more young men from all walks of life spend their leaves and money within her borders.’

Study suggests ‘hookups’ can turn into meaningful relationships

University of Iowa News Release

We didn’t see much evidence that relationships were lower quality because they started off as hookups. The study suggests that rewarding relationships are possible for those who delay sex. But it’s also possible for true love to emerge if things start off with a more ‘Sex and the City’ approach, when people spot each other across the room, become sexually involved and then build a relationship.

6 Reasons to Have Casual Sex

by Monica Shores

Casual sex and one-night stands are almost always framed as damaging to women, particularly young women. In recent years, writers like Laura Sessions Stepp and Wendy Shalit have issued dire warnings about the alleged dangers of sex outside of committed relationships. Let’s call this rhetoric what it is: a tired repeat of the sexist double standards that have haunted women for centuries.

An interesting selection of pictures of women dancing: tags could include burlesque, can-can, Korea, bar girls, Thailand, striptease, 1930s, 1950s, cabaret, fan dance, Soho, Anna May Wong, erotic, artistic, exotic, go-go, swing bands and?

Sweden’s The Local invited me to write on the government’s evaluation of the sex-buying law (sexköpslagen). I’m reproducing the article here minus stereotyped photo of woman’s high-booted legs in street at night with red overtones. It is very hard to illustrate these stories, I know, but I do feel the media could resist the worst cliches. These jolly masked men might be sex workers’ clients, as might this ashamed man be.

Big claims, little evidence: Sweden’s law against buying sex

Laura Agustín, 23 Jul 10, The Local

A new review of Sweden’s ban on buying sex has provided little hard evidence that the policy of prohibition has worked, writes Laura Agustín, but few politicians have dared to point out its obvious failings.

Every Swede knows that the famed law against buying sex – sexköpslagen – is a hot potato. Few politicians have commented one way or another on the evaluation of the law announced on 2 July, and only one government official claimed it proves the law is a success. Given that the report has been strongly criticised as empty of evidence and methodology but full of ideology in its very remit, debate has been curiously muted, even for the time of year.

At another period in history the sex-purchase law might have been considered a minor piece of legislation on a lesser social problem. Few people die, are maimed for life or lose their homes and jobs because of prostitution here; other threats to national security and happiness might seem more pressing.

But one feminist faction promotes the ideology that prostitutes are always, by definition, victims of violence against women. As victims, they can’t be criminals, so their side of the money-sex exchange is not penalised, whereas those who buy are perpetrators of a serious crime. This ideology, a minority view in other countries, predominates among Swedish State Feminists who claim that the existence of commercial sex is a key impediment to achieving gender equality. Such a dogma is odd, given the very small number of people engaged in selling sex in a welfare state that does not exclude them from its services and benefits. It is not illegal to sell sex in Sweden, just to buy it.

The evaluation leaned heavily on small-scale data about street prostitution, because that was the easiest to find. No one doubts that most street sex workers went somewhere else after the law came into effect, and no one knows where they went. But evaluators bolstered their case by claiming that street prostitution had increased in Denmark, where there is no such law, using information from a Copenhagen NGO whose inflated data was exposed in parliament last year. Street prostitution is known, in any case, to constitute a tiny, diminishing part of the whole of commercial sex.

The report confesses that ‘prostitution on the Internet’ was difficult to research but exhibits a poor understanding of the multiplicity of businesses, jobs and networks that characterise the sex industry. Asking police officials and social workers what they think is going on is no substitute for true research, and no academic studies pretend to know the extent of prostitution here. A government report from 2007 admitted it was difficult to find out much of anything about prostitution in Sweden.

The evaluation gives no account of how the research was actually carried out – its methodology - but is full of background material on Swedish history and why prostitution is bad. Only 14 sex workers were actually canvassed for their opinion of the law, seven of whom had already stopped selling sex. It is a rather pathetic display.

Several media commentators took the occasion to attack the law itself, since, despite regular government affirmations that the majority of Swedes support the law, opposition is fierce. In the blogosphere and other online forums, liberals, libertarians and non-conforming members of the main parties relentlessly resist a reductionist view of sexuality in which vulnerable women are forever threatened by predatory men.

But most politicians undoubtedly feel little good will come from complaining about legislation now symbolic of Mother Sweden. The Swedish Institute has turned the abolition of prostitution into part of the nation’s brand, what they call a ‘multi-faceted package to make Sweden attractive to the outside world.’ The SI, claiming to represent the most ‘socially liberal’ country on the planet, celebrates gender equality and gay love along with Ingmar Bergman, high technology and pine forests.

Sweden indisputably ranks high on several measures of gender equality, such as numbers of women who work outside the home, their salaries and length of parental leave. But other policies considered as part of gender equality are much harder to measure: cultural change, how people feel about sexual difference and, not least, the effect of a ban on buying sex. So it is hardly surprising that the government’s evaluation presents no evidence that relations between men and women have improved in Sweden because of the law. The evaluation’s main recommendation is to stiffen the punishment meted out to men who buy sex.

There was something new in Justice Minister Ask’s positioning of the law to the international media, however - a claim that it has been proved to combat organized crime, particularly the kind called sex trafficking. Citing no evidence, the report maintains there is less trafficking in Sweden because it is now ‘less attractive’ to traffickers.

Such naïve statements argue that without a demand for commercial sex there will be no supply, ignoring the complicated ways sex-money markets work in cultures with different concepts of family and love, reducing a wide range of sexual activities to an abstract notion of violence and brushing aside the many people who confirm that they prefer selling sex to their other livelihood options.

As for combating trafficking, there is no proof. Statistics continue to be a source of conflict in international debates, because different countries, institutions and researchers do not agree on what actually constitutes trafficking. It does not help that fundamentalist feminism refuses to accept the distinction between human trafficking and human smuggling linked to informal labour migration, as enshrined in the UN Convention on Organised Crime.

The Swedish government has proved nothing with this evaluation, and most Swedish politicians are keeping quiet, because they obviously know it.

I once thought of adding a section to my cv called Important Enemies, in which two kinds of people could be included. The first make conventional academic critiques based on ideology; here, Sheila Jeffreys would be a good example, peppering as she did The Industrial Vagina with references to my work as a sterling example of what’s wrong with views that don’t jibe with her vision of prostitution. The second would be non-academic attacks that seem to question the right of other people to do research at all. One example here would be Melissa Farley’s characterisation of my work as the postmodern nadir in an essay called ‘Theory versus reality: Commentary on four articles about trafficking for prostitution’, in a journal called Women’s Studies International Forum. The occasion was an edition with several articles critical to violence-against-women rhetoric about trafficking. I hadn’t written any of them and couldn’t help feeling chuffed. The Postmodern Nadir has a certain ring.

Attacking what academics choose to research and how they do it seems slightly odd to me. I have no romantic ideas about freedom of academic thought but I do suppose people end up researching general areas in general ways because they are drawn to them. I think of research as an endless stream of fairly random coloured bits that sometimes come together to fill in part of a big picture we will never comprehend. Time passes and the shapes we thought we had figured out change, but new research brings new bits of understanding.

Julie Bindel feels different, though, recently complaining, according to a reporter, that there is a lot of terrible anthropological research concerning women in the sex industry, and that they should not be treated as an anthropological field research group; she went so far as to say that if she had one bullet in a gun, it would not go for the pimp, but for the academic who’s all into the sex industry. The occasion was a panel at a UK Feminista event.

Not so many who research the sex industry are technically anthropologists, so maybe the criticism is against people who do ethnography. Which usually means not using formal interviews or quantitative surveys but spending a lot of time with the people being researched: living with them, or visiting them frequently over a long time, watching and listening, recording what you see, hear, smell, taste, feel. These days, ethnographers don’t ordinarily claim their results to be final truths about large groups but rather suggestive small-scale pictures.

What does it mean to suggest any subject should not be researched? Is the implication that research harms some people, who are better served by those taking particular ideological stances towards them? That’s pretty extreme Rescue Industry ideology. Since I am probably one of the anthropologist types whose research makes Julie Bindel angry, I might now add her name to the list of Important Enemies on that cv I haven’t written yet.

No figure is feared and misrepresented more than a man who facilitates the sale of sex for other people. Massive anti-prostitution generalisations about exploitation too often shut down attempts to understand how sexual cultures work by accusing all facilitators of being exploitative pimps and traffickers and ignoring different contexts and different meanings of the acts for those involved. Whether you want to regulate the sex industry or get rid of it, you have to understand how its many manifestations work. I advocate a cultural study of commercial sex, which you can read about here and here (with links to academic articles, too). Note also that talking about the variety of experience and subtlety of meaning within sex-money exchanges does not imply that everyone involved is happy, satisfied, unexploited or anything else. That middlemen are sometimes fair does not mean all of them always are.

Here are excerpts from an academic study* of one small place, a truck-stop in southwest Uganda. The authors situate what some might see as a conventional prostitution economy within general sexual culture that involves third parties.

Mediation customarily plays a central role in regulating sexual relations in local Kiganda culture. In selecting a suitable spouse, introductions, the process of betrothal through to the hand-over ceremony, the senga, or paternal aunt, played (and still plays) a pivotal role as mediator .  .  .

They then show how the middleman is seen as useful by both buyers and sellers in the commercial sex market of the truck stop.

Passing truck drivers usually do not have the time to Žfind themselves a suitable woman for the night because most must leave early the next morning, so they turn to a middleman to get them a woman quickly.

The driver pays the middleman according to a variety of factors, depending, for example, on who took the initiative, and how satisfied the driver is with the woman.

When the driver and the middleman know each other, or get along well, no payment is expected, but a gift may be offered, or they might share beer together. The middleman accompanies the driver and personally introduces him to the woman.

The most important reason women gave for using an intermediary is discretion. Although everybody knows that serving beer and food and cleaning are not the only work the women in bars and restaurants do, it is still necessary to keep up a certain degree of formal decency in such small communities. . .  Decency is maintained by outward appearance: it does not matter how many partners a woman may have, as long as people cannot see her actually recruiting them.

The driver spends the night with her and gives her an amount of money which usually exceeds the amount which she would get from men she contacted herself. Afterwards she gives a small part of what she earned to the middleman to show her gratitude and in the hope that he will send more men to her in the future.

The women also mentioned that when middlemen are involved, they can expect to receive more money than from the men who approach them directly. In this way, they meet men who are better off, who can afford to spend something on mediation.

The women saw mediation as providing insurance when establishing contact with a customer, as the clients are seen as being socially indebted to the middlemen. The transaction is also clearer from the start: frequently the clients tell the middlemen to inform the women that ‘money is not a problem’.

*Gysels, M. , Pool, R. and Bwanika, K.(2001) ‘Truck drivers, middlemen and commercial sex workers: AIDS and the mediation of sex in south west Uganda’, AIDS Care, 13, 3, 373-385.

My candle burns at both ends, by Raza Rumi at Himal Southasian

It is not a coincidence that the earliest novels of the Subcontinent dealt with the intense and memorable characters of ‘nautch girls’. Essentially a colonial construct, a nautch girl referred to the popular entertainer, a belle beau who would sing, dance and, when required, also provide the services of a sex worker.

My Illustrious Career in Times Square Peeps, Guy Gonzales, podcast by Audacia Ray

Legendary hardcore hustler Guy Gonzales was born in Manhattan of Asian-American ancestry. Despite the façade of a decent upbringing, he became enticed by the filthy streets. Flesh emporiums fueled his incentive; in 1982 Guy gravitated to Times Square, a reputed red-light district, and began as a cashier/mop-man in the adult peep shows.

Category: Images of strong women, women Doing Things, women who aren’t passive objects. Even if Patriarchy and Sexism were the name of the game.

I collect images of the sex industry, as part of a project to educate myself and others about the diversity actually involved, rather than staying with an oversimplified, unilluminating idea about prostitution. A lot of my picture collection can be seen here. The silent video below from Satoshi shows streets in a Yokohama red-light district with rows of small shops or cubicles used for sex work. Similar arrangements of sheds or ‘cribs’ were called chon-no-ma, and, until fairly recently, were open and staffed by non-Japanese women. Chon-no-ma were the target of anti-trafficking drives from about five years ago.

A few things strike me about this display. First, the silent, steady, slow movement of the camera. Second, the similarity of the windows and doors we’re taken past, like suburban shopping strips developers impose a style on. Third, the absence of humans, who would ordinarily be the object of our attention (perhaps the video was made in the early dawn). The result is mesmerising.

The sequence of events goes like this:

1. US government issues annual report card threatening to cut off aid from countries that don’t make the right efforts to combat trafficking
2. Threatened countries comply by passing legislation
3. And then instructing local police to carry out raids in order to ‘rescue’ victims
4. Police go to sex businesses, pick up all the workers and claim to have rescued them
5. Police say victims (sex workers) will be ‘rehabilitated’ via detention and forcible participation in an ‘alternative work’ programme, whether rescued people want this or not
6. Threatened national governments point to these actions to show US that they are fighting crime
7. US gives them a better grade on the next report card

Problems? Well yes, several, including the overtly neocolonialist coercion. In the following story which pointedly uses the word rescue, the police try to blame foreign devils for the existence of sex businesses, make sure to point out that some of those rescued were ‘only waitresses’ (which perfectly shows what they think about prostitutes), and, most important, if compliance with US aims to ‘convict’ traffickers is what’s needed, how does detaining and forcibly rehabilitating 200 victims help? What we’ve learned over and over is that some large number of the detained women do not want to be rescued, or not by the police, or not from sex work but possibly from poverty or the fear of disappointing their parents. I have unfortunately had to comment repeatedly on such stories, including recently on Cambodia. There are other ways to help people.

Anti-human trafficking agency rescues 200 women from Malate

Francis Faulve, 18 June 2010, ABS-CBN News

Manila, Philippines - The government’s anti-human trafficking task force on Thursday night rescued at least 200 women from a girlie bar in Malate district in Manila.

Retired military officer Jesus Kabigting of the government’s Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking said the raid was conducted in response to the US State Department’s report on human trafficking in the Philippines. The US State Department said the Philippines remains in the Tier 2 list of countries whose governments have failed to show improved efforts to curb human trafficking.

Representatives from the Manila Police District, Department of Social Welfare and Development and Department of Labor of Employment raided the LA Cafe at the corner of M.H. Del Pilar and R. Salas streets in Malate around 10:30 p.m.

Kabigting said majority of the women are being peddled to foreigners in Malate district. He said some of those rescued were only waitresses, but are also considered as victims of forced labor and human trafficking.

He said the women, particularly the prostitutes, will be “rehabilitated” and provided with alternative livelihood.

“Anti-human trafficking operations ito… Iyon ang dahilan kaya nagsagawa tayo ng walang humpay na operation against human trafficking (This ia an anti-human trafficking operation... That is the reason why we are conducting operations against human trafficking),” Kabigting told reporters referring to the US State Department’s report. He said similar raids will also be conducted nationwide.

Kabigting assured that charges will be filed against the owner of the bar. “Whether they have a permit to operate or not, they are committing acts in violation of the anti-human trafficking law. We will investigate them,” he said.

The US State Department was critical of the Philippine performance in all three benchmarks (prevention, protection and prosecution). It said that despite several labor trafficking cases were filed, the Philippine government never convicted any offenders. “Despite overall efforts, the government did not show evidence of significant progress in convicting trafficking offenders, particularly those responsible for labor trafficking,” the US State Department said in its report.