Youth on the street, selling sex and End Demand

With all the End Demand rhetoric around, it’s hard to remember that the word demand actually means many things. Hunt Alternatives Fund and people like Melissa Farley have put most of their eggs into a basket that makes men who pay money for any kind of sex the single important cause for all injustices and unhappinesses associated with sex work, child prostitution and sexual exploitation.

The issue of young people on the street who have a home somewhere they don’t want to live in – runaways – is always charged because of a widespread refusal to accept that everyone has a sexuality – babies, toddlers, children, teenagers, old people. In a recent discussion about End Demand campaigns in the United States, Johannah Westmacott made an interesting comment about the whole idea of demand. I first met Johannah when we were interviewed for an NPR show in Nevada last year on the topic of child sex trafficking. She is Coordinator for Trafficked Minors at Safe Horizon Streetwork Project in New York.

There are real demands out there that are forcing people (of all ages and genders) into the sex trade and if these demands weren’t there the people would be free to make other choices, and studies show that many people in the commercial sex trade say that if not for these demands they would leave the sex trade tomorrow. The three biggest demands that coerce people unwillingly into trading sex are the demand for safe shelters, affordable housing, and living wage jobs. Also low-threshold and supportive substance abuse treatment, but I’m not aware of that one being included in studies. Almost everyone I know who has participated in any way in the commercial sex trade has listed at least one of these things as the force that pressured them into the sex trade. The whole men demanding sex thing seems like a red herring to me. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but it certainly doesn’t happen at the same rate as poverty and homelessness. Why aren’t we trying to impact those demands since they have a much larger influence?

In example, in NYC there are approximately 4,000 unaccompanied homeless youth every single night. The city funds approximately 200 youth shelter beds. We are providing safe, age-appropriate shelter to less than 10% of the youth in our city who need it. When these young people have no safe way of sleeping indoors, and when they have already experienced violence from being on the streets, or when the weather outside is nasty, what choice do we give them for taking care of themselves and sleeping indoors? Maybe the young person is making a choice to go home with someone for the night, but until we actually offer them another option, we can’t judge them for making a forced choice. Decisions are really only as empowered as the options available.

If there were safe, low-threshold, voluntary youth shelters available on demand in NYC to everyone who requested them, without a waiting list involved, it would absolutely impact the number of youth involved in the commercial sex trade. I’m not saying that funding youth shelters would 100% eliminate youth involved in the commercial sex trade, but I am saying that it would be a game-changer. It would probably also be the most cost-effective and efficient way to impact the most number of youth either at-risk for coercion into the sex trade or who are already in the sex trade and want to exit or even take a break. Funding shelters would not only provide an alternative for youth currently in the commercial sex trade, it would also prevent a huge number of youth from feeling pressured to be involved in the first place. Again, I’m not saying 100%, but I really would guess that this impacts the majority of young people trading sex in NYC right now.

It may be noted also that a recent study in Massachusetts found a trend towards greater numbers of homeless among lgbtq youth. One sort of marginalised sexuality can contribute to another, unfortunately. Doesn’t the suggestion that shelters would make a huge difference make sense?

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

100 thoughts on “Youth on the street, selling sex and End Demand

  1. William Thirteen

    thanks for the post. the willful neglect of these ‘demands’ made on the young homeless – or other travelers for that matter – is one of the things that make the proselytizing of the End Demand cabal so irritating…

    Reply
    1. Laura Agustín

      you know, i do actually understand why people like kutcher are so het up about teenagers and sex. it’s the willful refusal to look at the general social picture and the pretense that one’s family of origin is so sacred that is dumb and makes him such an obvious target.

      Reply
  2. Maggie McNeill

    One of the points you and I and just about everyone involved in sex worker rights repeatedly makes, and “end demand” fanatics ignore, is that people do sex work for exactly the same reasons as they do any other kind of work, and for young people living on the street that’s even more so because they have no bank accounts or credit cards to fall back on. I can’t imagine having the kind of black-and-white view of the world these people live with in their heads and “demand” that everyone else adopt.

    Reply
  3. Pingback: Sex News: Walmart Fetish, James Franco at Kink, Rick Perry, The Last Pink Triangle | Hugging And Kissing

  4. antiplondon

    “Doesn’t the suggestion that shelters would make a huge difference make sense?”

    Yes, it makes perfect sense, but I take issue with a lot of other things you’re saying:

    “The issue of young people on the street who have a home somewhere they don’t want to live in – runaways – is always charged because of a widespread refusal to accept that everyone has a sexuality – babies, toddlers, children, teenagers, old people.”

    Yes, babies and toddlers and children do have a sexuality, but there’s no reason to suppose that those sexualities are actually compatible with the sexualities of the adult men (and women) who want to have sex with them, or, to be more realistic, sexually act upon them.

    Do you actually put a lower age limit on when it’s ok for children to engage in prostitution (you seem to use ‘children’ and ‘teenagers’ interchangeably a lot of the time)?

    I’m genuinely interested to know.

    Does it not occur to you that these homes teenagers don’t want to live in probably contain sexual abuse? What you’re saying is a longwinded version of “getting paid for it on the streets is better than giving it to daddy for free.”

    And you’re mashing together the issues of teenaged runaways and ‘moral panic’ over teenaged sexuality in a very awkward way, you almost seem to be saying that teenagers run away just to gain some kind of ‘sexual freedom’. People, generally, worry about teenaged runaways because they are very very vulnerable to violence and exploitation, and there’s not much of a future in homelessness generally; nobody wants to ‘rescue’ teenaged runaways only because they want to stop them having sex.

    Also, everything you quote from the Safe Horizon Streetwork Project, contradicts the idea that there’s any real kind of free ‘choice’ going on when teenagers engage in transactional sex – so I think it’s absolutely disgusting of you to refer to prostitution as a ‘sexuality’ in the same way being gay or lesbian is a sexuality, this is forced, survival behaviour, not a ‘sexuality’; to call prostitution a ‘sexuality’ is to say that some people are just ‘born whores’.

    “Decisions are really only as empowered as the options available” doesn’t seem to fit in with the whole ‘agency’ rhetoric of pro-prostitution, ‘sex positives’ like you, especially as elsewhere on this blog you are so keen to deny the boyfriend/pimp model of coercion, and insist teenagers are making a free choice to engage in prostitution.

    Reply
    1. Iamcuriousblue

      Really, so *that’s* what Laura Agustin is saying? You have a remarkably, shall we say, creative reading of what was actually said. The point is not that teenagers are making a completely free choice when selling sex, but rather that the black/white distinction of “completely free choice”/”total coercion” is flawed. And that’s the flawed model coming from your side of this debate – you seem to think that once you’ve knocked down the strawman of unconstrained choice, brutal coercion remains the only alternative, and that therefore your law enforcement-heavy solutions are a no-brainer. Sorry, but things really aren’t that simple.

      What Laura is pointing out is that the main form of coercion pushing anybody who doesn’t want to be in the sex trade to do so are basic bread-and-butter poverty issues. Given that, “End Demand” is entirely beside the point. At worst, buyers in such situations are taking advantage of an existing condition, but are certainly not the cause of it. And it seems to me that the emphasis on punishing buyers is indeed driven by a kind of moral panic and is most certainly not based on any kind of evidence-based problem-solving approach toward the issue of those that find themselves doing sex work that they’d rather not be doing.

      “‘Decisions are really only as empowered as the options available’ doesn’t seem to fit in with the whole ‘agency’ rhetoric of pro-prostitution, ‘sex positives’ like you

      Um, no, “Anti”, it just doesn’t fit in your *caricature* of that position. Most of us who speak of “agency” in fact acknowledge the conditional nature of agency and the nuanced nature of consent. It’s just that we also happen to respect individual agency and autonomy as key moral concerns, and hence emphasize respecting those factors to the degree that they exist even under very hard circumstances. For those of you who are dismissive of the very notion of individual autonomy, perhaps that’s not very persuasive, but then, I’d hate to live in a society based on dismissal of those concepts.

      Reply
      1. Laura Agustín

        Sometimes when people make these comments I actually have to reread what I wrote, because I don’t recognise what they’re accusing me of. Prostitution as a sexuality is indeed a bizarre idea, and one I didn’t say myself. Commenters often have not carefully read what I’ve written but just use this space to rant and fabricate.

        Reply
    2. Elle

      antiplondon maybe you should get YOUR MIND OUT OF THE GUTTER !
      Your comment revealed how you have blinders on! Or rather, ONE TRACK MIND. I suggest and I will even say PLEASE step back on occasion and look at things through various lenses. The author in no way made a comment as if to say that a child’s sexuality is compatible with an adults!!! She merely suggests that we look at sexuality in a more rational manner!!!! Of course if you are not able to be rational- then that’s a different story. It is NOT rational to think that men seeking sexual services are automatically supporting child sex trafficking for example! It is not rational to believe that you can put a stop to child trafficking by going after the entire adult sex industry! How you and other people think that it will be effective is mind blowing. It IS rational to see that POVERTY drives a great portion of the situation. It IS rational to seek out the causes of poverty and address the NEEDS of the people effected by poverty. Yes there are evil people. Yes there are victims who are trafficked, but you have mixed your personal ideologies and feelings (that may or may not have any real bearing) into the plan. It will not work. Neither is it rational to harm so many people trying to save other people! DO NO HARM.

      Take sexual stigmatization out of the equation!

      Reply
  5. Pingback: Infantalising gender in anti-human trafficking policy: demand change | The Migrationist

  6. Pingback: Infantalising gender in anti-human trafficking policy: demand change |

  7. antiplondon

    “Sometimes when people make these comments I actually have to reread what I wrote, because I don’t recognise what they’re accusing me of. Prostitution as a sexuality is indeed a bizarre idea, and one I didn’t say myself. Commenters often have not carefully read what I’ve written but just use this space to rant and fabricate.”

    Wow Laura, it took you over a year to respond to my comment, so it’s no surprise I’ve only just seen it!

    It’s a shame you didn’t respond to my question, I would still genuinely like to know if you have a lower age limit on when it is ok for a child to enter prostitution?

    Let’s have a look at what you wrote shall we, to see how I came to the conclusion that you were calling prostitution a sexuality:

    “The issue of young people on the street who have a home somewhere they don’t want to live in – runaways – is always charged because of a widespread refusal to accept that everyone has a sexuality – babies, toddlers, children, teenagers, old people.”

    See, this is a very odd thing to say in a blog post that is mainly about homelessness, poverty, vulnerability and survival sex – what does the sexuality of babies have to do with it, except that you want to smear everyone who is against prostitution as being against sex?

    What does the sexuality of runaway teenagers have to do with survival sex, unless you are claiming that runaway teenagers engaging in survival sex are somehow expressing their sexuality (which is the same as saying that ‘prostitute’ is a sexuality)?

    You also said in the comments thread: “you know, i do actually understand why people like kutcher are so het up about teenagers and sex.”

    Again you are conflating prostitution/survival sex with freely engaged in sexual activity, because you want to pretend those who are anti-prostitution are anti sex.

    Do you think runaway teenagers engaging in survival sex are having a positive sexual experience, or are they more likely to experience it as ‘compensated’ abuse?

    Reply
    1. Laura Agustín

      Just to clarify that it didn’t take me a year to reply to your previous message. I didn’t reply to it, full stop. I replied to something @iamcuriousblue said a year later.

      Reply
    2. Thaddeus Blanchette

      I think, Antiplodon, that you should ask that of teen prostitues themselves. They have voices, you know. I have never seen a teen prostitute say “Hey, arrest me to get me off the street because life in the justice system is just so much better!”

      As for a lower age limit, I don’t think kids should be working, period, whether it’s at sex or anything else. But you seem to miss the main point here, which is that runaways aren’t being drawn to sex work because of “demand”.

      As for people who are against prostitution being against sex… It’s been my experience that the vast majority of abolitionists are indeed against almost every kind of sex except for a very narrowly-defined, moralistic version of it.

      I personally know about a dozen people who did indeed leave their homes because mom and dad couldn’t handle their sexuality and who ended up working in the sex trade. All of those people have quite complex feelings about what they did and why. Those feelings can’t be boiled down to your simplistic view of them as “victims” or “survivors” or whatever politically-correct euphemism you want to use to deny them any agency whatesoever.

      When you make it so that the family is supposedly (and legally) the moral repository of all that is good in society and you pretend that, say, a 17 year old gay kid has no sexuality at all because the law demands he doesn’t, then you’re not working from a realistic basis for the understanding of why some kids end up ins ex work.

      Reply
  8. Sarah

    Based on the few comments here, I’m trying to wrap my head around why “sex pozzers” are so keen on hating radical feminists, and not, say, the men who sell children into sexual slavery.

    Reply
    1. Thaddeus Blanchette

      Personally? Because I”ve never met a single person who was sold into sex as a child by a man. I’m sure such people exist, but if I haven’t met one of them in a decade of visiting brothels in Brazil, I think it’s safe to say that they are pretty rare on the ground.

      On the other hand, I have literally dozens of friends and people I love who’ve been arrested and abused by police, often when they were minors, because of the anti-prostitution laws so-called “radical” feminists support.

      Reply
    2. Iamcuriousblue

      I hate the conditions that make impoverished children and adults feel like they have no other choice but to sell sexual services or starve. Those conditions are systemic and need to be addressed.

      Radical feminist fixation on “the men” is just a misguided ideological axe to grind, and has more to do with their own issues with men and emotionally-driven desire for punishment and revenge than it has to actually dealing with the underlying problem.

      Hate radical feminists? Well, if you’re somebody like Meghan Murphy who makes it their business to get in everybody’s face, hate on them and make all manner of shitty accusations, then, yes, I’m not going to like that person much. But generally, like the Religious Right, I’d say I dislike the ideology and the behavior that inevitably seems to come with it than I do the people who profess it.

      Reply
      1. Elle

        I am curiousblue..

        I was just watching a doc on VICE on youtube about the cannibal leaders in the conflict down in Africa. They went into a brothel where they interviewed women working in the brothel. These women stated there were children in the brothel. Conditions were horrific! But guess what? The locals stated as a matter of fact- that the brothel specifically followed wherever the UNITED NATIONS camp was set up. Wherever the U.N. went these brothels followed. What does THAT tell you????? Who is patronizing those brothels? WAR based in power grabbing and control of natural resources has absolutely created a demand. Let’s see these anti-traffickers go after the private US based government contractors based in these foreign countries LOL. Let’s see them go after the U.N. Yeah I didn’t think so. It’s much easier to beat on little people who are already down I guess. It’s much easier to go after every day people just trying to survive.

        Reply
  9. Gem

    Sarah, “sex pozzers” as you like to call us, dislike both hateful radical feminists *and* men who sell children into sex. Most of us have just met far, far, far more of the former.

    Reply
      1. antiplondon

        Hmm, so you claim to hate men who sell children into sex, but you have no problem with child prostitution itself, and defend child prostitution as ‘sex’.

        You also want to decriminalise pimps generally, and defend the older boyfriend/pimp model of exploitation by claiming that because those exploited children don’t want to testify against their abusers, that means everything must be fine.

        https://www.lauraagustin.com/child-trafficking-or-kids-who-leave-home-and-their-pimps-and-their-friends-in-las-vegas

        Explain to me again how you hate men who sell children into sex?

        Reply
        1. Elle

          antiplondon How do you feel about the women mentioned in the above article, who were consensual sex workers who had their children taken from them because they were sex workers? Is that a reason that children should be taken? If the mother was adhering to healthy boundaries regarding her work- if the child was stable, healthy, loved, fed, clothed- can you justify children being taken from their mothers simply because they choose sex work? I personally know quite a number of mothers who are fantastic parents, putting their kids through college and more- as sex workers. Some of the best parents I know happen to work in the adult industry.

          HHmmm????

          Are you ok with these children being put at risk (do you know the statistics pertaining to children being abused in foster care for example?) simply because their mothers are sex workers? Are you going to say these mothers put their children at risk simply because they are sex workers?

          Reply
  10. nada

    I hate everyone that propose dangerous laws for sex workers and make stigmatizing comments about sex workers. I don’t care if you are rad fem or Christian right.

    I also hate anyone that use “children” and “victim” stories to sell their own ideology- books- fund organizations- whatever.. Whether it be “child trafficking” to sell the idea to push dangerous laws that tries to abolish sex work or “internet child porn” to push surveillance by the government or limit of freedom of information .

    Reply
  11. antiplondon

    Laura,

    Why don’t you want to explain what this paragraph means?

    “The issue of young people on the street who have a home somewhere they don’t want to live in – runaways – is always charged because of a widespread refusal to accept that everyone has a sexuality – babies, toddlers, children, teenagers, old people.”

    You are very clearly equating a homeless teenager engaging in survival prostitution with teenage sexuality, what is that if not equating prostitution with sexuality?

    Why don’t you want to tell me what you think is the lowest acceptable age for a child to engage in prostitution?

    Thaddeus,

    The Nordic/abolitionist model of prostitution involves decriminalising the prostitute her or himself, while criminalising the john, so no abolitionist is calling for teenaged prostitutes to be arrested, for ‘their own good’ or any other reason.

    Religious/conservative people may well think sex should only occur within the ‘sanctity of marriage’, but radical feminists do not. Second wave feminists in the 70s and 80s (the foremothers of today’s radical feminists) were the ones to break the taboo of silence around domestic violence, rape within marriage, child abuse and incest, and it was radical feminists who came up with the term ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, so there is no veracity to the claim that radical feminists (who are always abolitionist) think the family is either sacred or safe.

    Radical feminists are against all forms of compulsory sexual activity, whether that’s the sex industry, or within a marriage. We are against all forms of sexual coercion, including economic and social inequality, as well as the more obvious ones like the immediate threat of violence.

    “Those feelings can’t be boiled down to your simplistic view of them as “victims” or “survivors” or whatever politically-correct euphemism you want to use to deny them any agency whatesoever.”

    Everyone has ‘agency’, only someone who is completely physically incapacitated so that they cannot move at all has no agency. Someone with a gun to their head has a choice (do what their captor wants or be shot) and therefore has agency – the term has become almost meaningless.

    A homeless thirteen-year-old who is cold and hungry and afraid to spend another night on the street has ‘choices’ and has ‘agency’ to make those choices, between a more shitty and a less shitty option. The ‘agency’ of a homeless thirteen-year-old doesn’t change the fact that the men who pay to rape them are abusers.
    “I”ve never met a single person who was sold into sex as a child by a man. I’m sure such people exist, but if I haven’t met one of them in a decade of visiting brothels in Brazil, I think it’s safe to say that they are pretty rare on the ground.”

    You’re a john, you see what you want to see. Recent cases in the UK, in Rochdale and Oxford, demonstrate that gangs of men do target vulnerable girls as young as eleven, they groom them with attention and then alcohol and drugs, and then gang rape them and sell them for sex.

    “On the other hand, I have literally dozens of friends and people I love who’ve been arrested and abused by police, often when they were minors, because of the anti-prostitution laws so-called “radical” feminists support.”

    Really, has Brazil introduced the Nordic Model? I didn’t notice! The Nordic model involves the decriminalisation of prostitutes and the criminalisation of johns, something that sex industry advocates always deliberately and cynically refuse to acknowledge.

    Iamcuriousblue,

    “Radical feminist fixation on “the men” is just a misguided ideological axe to grind, and has more to do with their own issues with men and emotionally-driven desire for punishment and revenge than it has to actually dealing with the underlying problem.”

    You know what, I do want to see the men who pay to rape children and teenagers punished, don’t you?

    Reply
    1. Iamcuriousblue

      Nice rhetorical strategy, Anti, but I’m not taking that bait. Either I agree with your rhetoric and framing of the issue, or I think rape and rapists are OK, I guess?

      FYI, I don’t think most buyers of sexual services fall into the category of those who “pay to rape children and teenagers”.

      Reply
    2. Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette

      Dear antiplodon,

      The fact that you think the nordic model doesn’t criminalize women is, to me, proof positive that you’ve never actually spent time with prostitutes watching them work or watching the cops deal with them.

      What REALLY happens under the “nordic model” is this: both john and prostitute are arrested. They are both hauled down to the copshop, often in cuffs. If the prostitute has any possible legal trouble that can be used against her – let’s say she’s an illegal immigrant, just for starters – this will be trotted out to try to get her to turn state’s evidence and she will be tossed into the slammer, a criminal.

      If she DOESN’T have any legal troubles, she’ll tell the state to fuck off and they’ll have no way of prosecuting the john. Both will be let go after a couple hours. So there’s your precious “john criminalization” flying right out the fucking window.

      Have you actually looked at how many johns they’ve successfully prosecuted under the Nordic model? Do you even care if it works as advertized, or is it just a convenient talking pont for you?

      TWhat the “nordic model” REALLY does is create the criminalized repression of certain kinds of prostitutes, most notably the foreign females that those nice, liberal Swedes and Norwegians want to kick out of their country.

      I listened to the Chief of Police of Gothemburg describe this model here in Rio de Janeiro in 2004 and he admitted to using ethnic profiling in determining who his cops should stop and arrest. He also admitted to using prostitutes’ immigration status to force them to turn state’s evidence. The man was a right little fascist, racist prick, but self-proclaimed “radfem” idiots applaud the likes of him as a “brave defender of women” when he’s locking those evil foreign whores up.

      So give me no bullshit about how the “nordic model” is not being used to arrest and prosecute prostitutes. It is ROUTINELY used that way because law enforcement is NEVER about respecting prostitutes’ rights as human beings or women. The law allows cops to drag women down to the station and go over them with a fine-toothed comb. If they can’t get her on prostitution, they’ll get her on something else. And even in those cases where they can’t hold the woman on a drug or immigration (or disturbing the peace, or public indecency, or while “investigating accusations of sexual exploitation”) charge, she’s still taken off the streets, dragged down to the police station, held against her will there, sometimes all night, and written up as a prostitute in the incident report.

      This is police repression and harassment of prostitutes, any way you look at it, and only a fool – or someone who has no idea at all how police really work on the streets – would say that this doesn’t result in the “criminalization” of these women.

      You can drag the women in to the cop shop any time you like and keep her there for hours – perhaps even days – while you “investigate” charges of prostitution? THAT IS TREATING SOMEONE LIKE A CRIMINAL, SISTER, so bull me no shit about how this model respects these women as normal citizens.

      The nordic model isn’t abolitionism: IT’S REGULATION WEARING A BRAND NEW COAT.

      You probably don’t know this, but even in the U.S., it’s very difficult to actually find a person guilty of prostitution. Most arrests there do exactly what the “nordic model” does: they drag the woman off the street, harass her, and generally subject her to abuse. That is what anti-prostitution laws are for, after all: they are hardly ever for the “criminalization” of prostitution. They are used to control and repress and – in short – effectively regulate prostitution and that is EXACTLY what the Nordic model does.

      Please learn some basic information about how the sex trade actually works and how cops relate to it before you start spewing arrant bullshit about the Nordic model as a form of policing that doesn’t harass, stigmatize and ultimately criminalize women.

      As for you so-called, self-proclaimed radical feminists and your supposed views on sex, hooray for you! That’s what makes it all the more shameful that people like you enter into political and moral alliances with the folks who want to stick women back in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. Down here in Brazil, we call the sort of stance being taken by so-called “radical feminists” such as yourself “hypocrisy”. Take a look at where the money is coming from for your new abolitionist campaign: it doesn’t come from folks like you. The main funders and organizers, on a global level, are the religious right.

      Funny how you folks are so set against whoring and yet you have no trouble getting into bed with the folks who gave the world the Magdalene Laundries. I guess as long as they’re ponying up cash for your crusade, you can grin and bear them, neh, Plod?

      You think I’m a john? I’m an ex sex worker, fool, with plenty of sex worker friends and people I love. I work for a sex workers’ rights organization here in town and I am in and out of brothels because I’m actually interviewing women regarding their lives and working conditions. I don’t have to get my information from newspapers quoting (generally incorrectly) studies: I get it direct from prostitutes themselves and I WRITE the results of studies.

      But that said, most johns I’ve met have more compassion towards sex workers in their right pinky toenail than is present in an entire herd of yammering “radfem” café crawlers. You folks routinely expulse prostitutes from your events. You won’t even bother to LISTEN to a sex worker unless you can pay her to spout whatever line you’re pitching this week. You could actually learn a thing or two about respect for prostitutes from johns. Contrary to your prejudiced beliefs, the vast majority of those guys aren’t rapists and aren’t pedophiles. Were they to see a child being abused in a brothel, most of them would drop a dime faster than you can yelp “Melissa Farley”.

      Yeah, there are shitty johns, just as there are shitty husbands and CERTAINLY shitty cops. But a cop, Ploddy, is several times more likely rape a sex worker than a john and yet here you are, rooting fore more police control over prostitution.

      Thinking that cops can adequately deal with prostitutes’ problems – especially under you precious “nordic model”, which institutionalizes xenophobia and racism – is a bit like thinking a pedophile would be a great day care worker because she loves the kiddies.

      Universally and consistently, the world over, the police have been sex workers’ worst enemies. How come we never hear you abbies mentioning that salient and very well-proven fact when you start spouting off about how cops need to be busting people?

      With regards to Brazil, I’m sure you don’t notice a lot about this country, beginning with what language we speak. You CERTAINLY don’t know sweet fuck all about our prostitution laws.

      We’ve had what is arguably a variant of the Nordic Model in place since 1890: prostitutes aren’t criminalized, but pretty much every one else dealing with prostitutes at any level are, including those who “recruit” for prostitution, which is any person who asks another person for paid sex, or “defend” prostititution, which can be anyone found in a brothel.

      So yeah, you haven’t heard about Brazil adopting the Nordic model, because we’re already basically there and have been so for more than a century. And please, bull me no shit about what wikipedia tells you: I just turned in a chapter dealing with Brazilian sex laws for a new global history of prostitution. If you ever bother to learn Portuguese, you might want to actually turn to the Brazilian criminal code and see what it has to say about this subject instead of basing your opinions on hearsay and prejudice.

      Please: either GO to brothels, TALK to the women working there and DO THAT on a constant basis or kindly piss off. Your pop culture education on prostitution does you no service and it doesn’t help the men and women involved in it in the slightest bit. All it does is give you a nice little rap to lay on people the next time you go down to your local coffee house so you can look ever so “radfem” to your pals without actually having to get your hands dirty. Y’know, with actually fighting for human rights and all that other icky stuff.

      Reply
    3. nada

      “You know what, I do want to see the men who pay to rape children and teenagers punished, don’t you?”

      This is exactly it- the focus for so-called “radical feminism” is about punishing men. Not at all how to support WOMEN.

      I actually don’t give a flying fuck about punishing anyone. Nor about retribution- I’d like to see laws support women and listen to women in the industry about concerns of police violence , stigma, discrimination. Listening to the community organizations about what might support better lives for sex workers. Instead, the rad fem IGNORES the sex workers – goes on a hunt to punish men AT THE COST OF FURTHER ENDANGERING SEX WORKERS – seriously, if I had choice to hunt down the very rare men that does kidnap kids or radical feminists and christian right that support dangerous laws- I’d hunt down the latter because I think it would help create safer laws that would actually prevent further violence.

      Reply
      1. antiplondon

        Really, you’re not interested in seeing rapists punished? Don’t you think that a lack of punishment for such an offense might mean that more men go out and commit rape?

        Reply
        1. nada

          conflating all sexual negotiation that exchange money as rape severely undermines experiences of people who experience real rape and violence.

          Reply
        2. nada

          I reckon there’s less rapists than bad cops and patronizing rad feminists that further stigma and discrimination.

          Reply
          1. antiplondon

            Do you really believe that?

            Sure, most men who rape will rape more than once, but the lifetime risk for a women of being raped is 25%, that’s a lot of rape and a lot of rapists.

            You have developed a very warped and frankly anti-woman perspective, in service of your need to defend the sex industry.

            Reply
          2. nada

            I don’t believe it. I work in the sex industry and know many people in the sex industry – not sitting infront of the computer making judging other people and telling others they are being raped.

            Reply
          3. nada

            further, it’s you – antiplo, that has a warped idea about women that all women should behave sexually the way YOU wish them to and that all men are rapists there fore, sex work should be abolished.

            Reply
        3. Lilithe

          That’s dealing with a symptom and not the source of the problem – that those who would report such atrocities are the very people who are already criminalized and have no recourse for reporting without being penalized themselves.

          Reply
    4. Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette

      But let me address the particular bloody shroud you like to wave as if it were the answer to all issues surrounding prostitution, Plod: the rape of eleven year old girls.

      Now here’s something I don’t understand: how does siccing the cops on adult, consenting, independent sex workers save that girl?

      How does wasting the cops’ time, energy and funds, running down adult sex workers and clients, help that 11 year old?

      And, inverting the question, how does decriminalized prostitution end up making it harder for cops to bust the people raping and abusing that girls?

      Decriminalization does not mean that the sexual abuse of children all of a sudden becomes acceptable and legal. NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THE DECRIMINALIZATION OF CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE! In fact, decriminalizing adult prostitution frees the cops to investigate cases of slavery and rape – whether they occur in the sex trade or elsewhere.

      Here’s something for you to ponder. In February, the FBI and the New Orleans police launched a massive anti-trafficking operation around the Superbowl, claiming that 10,000 women would be trafficked to the event.

      The cops arrested 85 people, only two of which are plausibly traffickers (if we presume run-of-the-mill, small time pimps are traffickers). Five supposed victims were “rescued”. 78 other people were tossed in jail with no evidence whatsoever that they were involved in trafficking. Five of the women were mothers and lost custody of their children simply for being sex workers. Some 40 of the other arrestees were prostitutes.

      Now, in the same week that this occurred, there were three rapes and one case of child sexual abuse reported in New Orleans. Of these cases, only two ended up having suspects arrested – weeks after the crimes.

      How, exactly, did employing those cops in arresting those 68 people who had nothing to do with trafficking make New Orleans safer for the three women and one kid who were actually raped that week?

      Isn’t it just possible that if the cops went after actual violent criminals – including child rapists and abusive pimps – instead of spending their days busting adult, consenting johns and prostitutes, that they’d have a better chance of catching rapists?

      This is what is so idiotic about your claim that the criminalization of prostitution according to the Nordic model is somehow going to protect that raped 11 year old you’re always going on about: siccing cops on pros and johns doesn’t end up in the liberation of many abused children because – FACT – the vast majority of pros aren’t children and the vast, immense majority of child sexual abuse doesn’t occur anywhere near brothels.

      For every kid cops manage to find in brothels, they end up arresting and harrassing hundreds – perhaps even thousands – of adult consenting sex workers. And no, don’t give me that BS that “saving children is worth any sacrifice”. The cops could just as easily save those children and NOT arrest those hundreds of adult, consenting sex workers. In fact, the cops would have a better time going after rapists and child abusers if all that man-power and money spent on hyped up anti-vice campaigns was actually spent on the REPRESSION OF RAPE AND SEXUAL ABUSE. The cops don’t need to arrest 68 johns and pros in order to find two pimps and five trafficking victims. The violation of pros and johns human rights doesn’t magically, somehow, transform into chiuldren saved from rape.

      And here’s another thing for your wee brain to ponder: if, instead of treating prostitution as a criminalized activity, one were to assure adult, consenting johns and prostitutes that they would be treated like citizens and have their human rights respected, wouldn’t it be just possible that the people who frequent borthels would become society’s front line of defence against child exploitation?

      See, here’s where your prejudice and hatred do you in: most prostitutes and johns are completely normal, regular people. They don’t want to see kids get abused and exploited any more than you do. But they’re not likely to say anything, are they, when they know that the cops will treat them as criminals or as an accessory to a crime, will they?

      The fact of the matter is this, Plod: you don’t really give a wet flying fuck about how we can best protect 11 year olds from sexual exploitation. Your real political focus is your hatred of men, in general. Only a complete fool would presume that all or most men grin and applaud when the see children being sexually abused. Only a moral moron would assume that most men are like the Steubenville rapists. Only an idiot would think that police, who are hands down the social category that most sexually abuses sex workers, should be encharged with “saving” them.

      Go back to your little radfem coffee clatch, Plod. You don’t have the slightest clue as to what you’re yipping about when you tell us how the Nordic model is going to save the world and your precious legions of raped eleven year olds.

      Reply
      1. Elle

        WOW Thad! I concur and then some!! LOL. I read your comment with the info about the women who had their children taken from them for being sex workers. I have asked plod how she/he can justify such a thing. I wonder what if anything the answer will be. It truly is sickening the harm that ideologies and moralizing has done and how these people refuse to see it. You have hit the nail on the head in numerous instances. I attempt to be polite but these people are just nuts. IRRATIONAL and ARROGANT. Maybe the time for politeness IS over. They certainly haven’t been polite from day one! LOL.

        Reply
        1. Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette

          What REALLY pisses me off is when you realize that a major entry point for child prostitution is being a runaway from a foster home or a recently released inmate of a state institution.

          Plus, kids in institutions are at a huge risk for rape or sexual abuse.

          So there’s no way in hell Plod can justify this sort of shit, if she’s truly worried about eleven year olds being forced into sex, like she says.

          Reply
    5. Elle

      When you try to tell other human beings what they cannot do with their bodies you are removing that person’s agency!!!! Do you realize this???

      Reply
    6. Elle

      >You’re a john, you see what you want to see.<

      Wow. You aren't guilty of marginalizing eh? Wow. So if a man admits he engages consensual sex workers (I am assuming because I did not read the entire thread) you are going to simply cut him off, as his view or perspective is invalid?? Do you also picture him sitting there with saliva running down his mouth with his hand in his pants???

      Based on what I have read of your comments here, you have quite the program going in that thought construct of yours! One that will not allow you to consider the vast diversity in the realm you are attempting to navigate! You have blinders on and you don't care. You are willing to run over anyone who does not adhere to your construct. How lovely. People like you are dangerous. "A zealous man (or woman) who lacks understanding is dangerous"

      Reply
    7. Elle

      <Really, has Brazil introduced the Nordic Model? I didn’t notice! The Nordic model involves the decriminalisation of prostitutes and the criminalisation of johns, something that sex industry advocates always deliberately and cynically refuse to acknowledge.<

      Who are you talking about?
      I am an industry advocate (the healthy aspects anyway and there ARE healthy aspects to the sex industry. I'd be happy to discuss this with you. Or would you even dare to wonder that there are healthy aspects!?)

      I am appalled at the marginalization and demonizing of all clients who purchase adult services. It's always more broad stroking as if this could ever be realistic. You can't broad stroke any group of humans just because there is one or more related factors among them (men who purchase sex are all bad and in the least are supporting the trafficking of children for example). You don't like it when someone marginalizes YOU do you?? I'd bet money you don't. Yet you are happy to marginalize to suit your agenda. What does that say about your character? Does it matter? HELL YEAH it matters when you are
      basically working as a social engineer seeking to impact society and govern other individuals based on your personal ideologies. Which BY THE WAY many of the people you seek to impact (you can safely bet) are NOT interested in your ideologies!!!

      Regarding your comment, I for one will not support any so called solutions or strategies that shame, demonize, marginalize, stigmatize and otherwise disenfranchise any human or group of humans for ANY reason. I find it profoundly arrogant of any person who assumes they can choose for other human beings what they can and cannot do with their lives.

      I find it grossly arrogant that humans would seek to put what they deem to be a 'solution' to a problem (whatever that problem might be) in the form of legislation- in place, that engineers the social structure in such a way that it creates victims! In your construct this is collateral damage which is justified. In my mind it is arrogance at its worst. Not to mention downright irrational.

      There has yet to be brought forth a reasonable rational effective solution (let alone one that has been put into action).

      Nordic Shmordic

      Too bad there are such limited thinkers involved in this issue (predominantly on the anti-trafficking side and maybe this is partly due to the 'system' that we all have to deal with regardless of what perspective you hold on these issues. I see that there is a 'business' aspect to the government side of all this and the anti-traffickers are all up in that business! They have the funds and they want the funds! I see people who have agendas, they have a stake in 'a' game.

      If you are truly interested in helping your fellow human being you might try dumping the idiotologies involving sexism, agism, genderism, and all the rest of the baggage you are obviously wrestling with. Do you have any concept of selflessness? You might also take a break from the crusade. If all you see is the horrors and you replay these in your mind over and over, how is that healthy? Frankly, there are times I have to wonder if the women involved in the anti-trafficking movement are not all that different from people who crave 'death porn'. Only add in a Florence Nightingale complex. Be offended I don't care. I have witnessed this too often for it not to be the case in some instances. Even the part about the rich woman making a name for herself 'helping the less advantaged' only maybe the 'help' isn't the kind of help needed its just the kind of help SHE deems appropriate. ARROGANCE. They get addicted to the emotional intensities they experience as they observe the tragedies that they seek out observation of. Most people are so unaware of any trafficking issues, sad but true right? Isn't this why you people feel so strongly about getting what you are saying out there?? On the other hand there is a self righteous attitude that is overwhelmingly apparent in many anti-trafficking anti-porn activists. It is nauseating. LOL. And while they make their voices heard in the halls of various city and state municipalities- they do practically NOTHING that has a reasonably healthy impact on the society they claim to care so much about and are actually supporting a lot of harm to the women and children they claim to be 'saving'.

      Just calling it like I have seen it.

      Reply
  12. Iamcuriousblue

    “The Nordic/abolitionist model of prostitution involves decriminalising the prostitute her or himself, while criminalising the john, so no abolitionist is calling for teenaged prostitutes to be arrested, for ‘their own good’ or any other reason.”

    No “abolitionist”? From where I’m sitting here in the US, so-called “abolitionist” politics and “Nordic model” advocacy inevitably translates into harsher laws against sex workers themselves:

    chicagoreporter.com/news/2012/11/escorted-jail

    I could really give a shit about the idealized version of “abolitionism” and what you all claim you support. I care about what the kind of law and order approach you take toward sex work comes out to in actual practice. I care about real people, not bullshit “idealism”.

    Reply
  13. sex work is work

    “Religious/conservative people may well think sex should only occur within the ‘sanctity of marriage’, but radical feminists do not. Second wave feminists in the 70s and 80s (the foremothers of today’s radical feminists) were the ones to break the taboo of silence around domestic violence, rape within marriage, child abuse and incest, and it was radical feminists who came up with the term ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, so there is no veracity to the claim that radical feminists (who are always abolitionist) think the family is either sacred or safe.

    Radical feminists are against all forms of compulsory sexual activity, whether that’s the sex industry, or within a marriage. We are against all forms of sexual coercion, including economic and social inequality, as well as the more obvious ones like the immediate threat of violence.”

    Get out of here Johnny come lately. Sex work is a device that undermines the patriarchy and the institution of marriage. WE in the sex worker movement are the radical feminists. We are the mothers of the revolution. You are the devil spawn that turned on us after Dworkin twiddled your collective buttons. Abolitionists are NOT radical because they 1/ think its ok to call the state and sick the cops onto other women AND 2/ think it’s perfectly fine to deprive another woman of a livelihood because that woman is not measuring up to your ideological standard. That’s called white privilege btw, that you can sit around and muse about the lives of those lesser and darker than your good white self. (I know you are white, from your patronising tone.

    Your abolitionist faux radical faux feminist line is a violence against women measure designed to inflict suffering on “bad women”. Carceral feminism is still violence against women. Cops, army, state – NOT feminist. Stop with your fancy talk about “decrmininalising the prostitute”. Feminists do NOT siKKK the cops onto other women. That is fascism in the name of feminism. At best you are frauds, at worst you are torturers.

    Our movement – community organising, solidarity, critical to HIV/AIDS response, raising children, remaining housed, helping each other – FEMINIST.

    Reply
    1. Elle

      <<Your abolitionist faux radical faux feminist line is a violence against women measure designed to inflict suffering on “bad women”. <<

      Ask yourselves- can you respect a woman who is empowered by what she does in the capacity of sex work? Are you able to consider the reality that there ARE men and women whose motives are based in doing therapeutic healthy work with their clients in the capacity of sex worker? Despite any lack of whatever credentials you would have them have?

      Is everything connected with the sex industry DIRTY to you??

      Do you shame everything and everyone outside of your construct on such matters?

      There ARE healthy people working in the adult industry and these people provide healthy services to the clients they attract and engage. There are healthy clients in the realm of sex work.

      I want to highlight this aspect of the adult industry because it IS there and people don't seem to outright address this often enough.

      There are plenty of people who want out of the sex industry, there are people who choose to do it, they make the best of it, they would choose something different if they felt they had options, there are people who fell into it by circumstance to pay their bills, there are people who were exploited into it, there are people who work in the capacity of sex work because they truly want to work as healers, there are so many different circumstances.

      CIRCUMSTANCE and MOTIVES are extremely important here!

      Laws, so called solutions, social strategies that treat humans as if they are cookie cut outs is doomed to fail miserably outside of successful tyranny.

      I guess if certain people get to feel better about themselves- rise to the top politically or in some capacity- put a star by their name- tell themselves they accomplished something 'in the name of the children'- who cares if the legislation or the programs put into place actually work or do good for EVERY person whose life will be effected by them.

      How about creating resources for people?- take those millions and give the money to programs lacking ideologies that simply work to help people without prejudice. How about that for real HELP? SELFLESS help.

      OH NO! If it isn't going to benefit you in some way politically you are not interested!!!!! These are power grabbers from what I have seen.

      I think some people have a very negative view of their fellow human beings.
      They see people as being less than them. It's very easy for these types to 'throw people away'. Who gets to decide who is worthy and who is not? It is amazing what people can do when given real opportunities that do not shame or stifle the spirit.

      Those DIRTY WHORES don't deserve nuttin.

      LOL.

      Reply
    2. Elle

      sex work is work….

      When you say ‘Get out of here Johnny come lately. Sex work is a device that undermines the patriarchy and the institution of marriage.’ I see this as agreeable when it comes to certain thought processes absolutely. Some people feel threatened.

      Though I want to add that in REALITY, there are MANY instances where sex work certainly has kept marriages TOGETHER.

      The issues/motives/ reasons connected to WHY people end up seeking out sexual services are VAST and deserve much more consideration than what is given by the anti-porn anti-sex work campers thus far. This is exactly why ‘end for demand’ is an insult.

      Reply
  14. Justin Schwartz

    Not sure that sex work destabilizes the family. At least in the 19th century, it probably kept the family going.

    The previous post neglects the fact that a very substantial proportion of sex workers are young men and boys. I’m not a radical feminist (socialist feminist, rather), but I don’t think any analysis of the issues can be complete or accurate if we assume that all sex workers are women and girls.

    Reply
    1. laura agustin Post author

      The previous poster is addressing the ideas propagated by abolitionists, who know perfectly well that men sell sex but don’t care unless they can be called ‘boys’. In sexworkers’ rights movements no such idiot distinctions are made, but you will find more debating about ‘women’ because that is the ideological nut reproduced endlessly by anti-trafficking policymakers and moral entrepreneurs.

      Reply
        1. Elle

          For some reason my post was cut off.

          This is what I was referring to when I stated excellent title for them!
          That is exactly what is happening. If there is a way to corporatize ‘saving the children’ they will find a way to do it if they haven’t already. Money, political power, notoriety- but not really helping people as much as they are doing harm regarding the bigger picture.

          Reply
    2. Elle

      The ONLY thing threatening the stability of MY family is the economy ran by a bunch of banksters- and the anti-trafficking agenda that will not acknowledge anything outside of its agenda. Otherwise we have GOOD STUFF happening no complaints! LOL.

      Reply
  15. Sex work is work

    The rescuing is all about ‘women and girls’. I use women because our movement does adopt a feminist (and socialist) approach which stands to reason as most of us are biological females. It is not meant to invisibilize male or transgender sex workers as they play a vital role in fighting the abolitionists too. As an example, males tend to be better educated than females so in SE Asia for instance the male and transgender sex workers teach the women how to speak English. This opens windows into understanding the nature of their own oppression regarding rescue. It helps to know why they were whisked off the streets and thrown into ‘rehab’ or jail. They start to learn about the western abolitionists, about the being an alliance of these so called radfems and Christian evangelists and how this kind of extremism is being forced onto them by foreigners and foreign governments.

    Reply
  16. antiplondon

    Elle @25 March 2013, 20.43,

    Agustin is very clearly in favour of child prostitution (she uses the terms ‘child’ and ‘teenager’ interchangeably), she thinks prostitution is a good way for homeless children to make money, and that it’s a good way for children in the developing world to earn money for their families.

    https://www.lauraagustin.com/childhood-trafficking-research-agency-and-cultural-contradictions

    She very clearly has no problem with adults having sex with children, and her repeated refusal to say how young she thinks is too young for a child to enter prostitution makes me think she’s fine with children under ten prostituting.

    There is no convenient barrier between child prostitution and adult prostitution, it happens in the same places, it’s advertised through the same channels and it’s carried out by the same johns.

    Of course poverty is a major factor, and I have never said anything to the contrary.

    Elle @25 March 2013, 20.51,

    I don’t know which article you’re referring to, but no, I don’t think a woman’s children should be taken away just because she is a prostitute. If her behaviour (including the strange men she brings home) is actively, physically endangering her children, then removing them from her may be necessary.

    As I’ve said before and will keep on saying, the Nordic Model involves decriminalising the prostitute herself, while criminalising the john, so under the Nordic Model, no woman would have her children taken away from her just for being a prostitute.

    Iamcuriousblue,

    How do you explain this paragraph then?

    “The issue of young people on the street who have a home somewhere they don’t want to live in – runaways – is always charged because of a widespread refusal to accept that everyone has a sexuality – babies, toddlers, children, teenagers, old people.”

    If it is not equating the ‘sex’ involved with a teenager engaging in survival prostitution with teenage sexuality, what is it doing?

    Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette,

    “NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THE DECRIMINALIZATION OF CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE!”

    Well, actually, Agustin is. I find it odd that she has so many keen supporters who are apparently 100% against the sexual exploitation of children, while Agustin herself thinks child prostitution is great, and that stopping children ‘working’ in this way makes them unhappy.

    “And here’s another thing for your wee brain to ponder: if, instead of treating prostitution as a criminalized activity, one were to assure adult, consenting johns and prostitutes that they would be treated like citizens and have their human rights respected, wouldn’t it be just possible that the people who frequent borthels would become society’s front line of defence against child exploitation?”

    No, because johns don’t give a shit, and never have, and the tiny handful of ‘saviour johns’, who bothered to report their concerns only after paying to rape a trafficking or under-age victim, aren’t going to convince me otherwise.

    From an article by Joan Smith in the Independent:
    independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/why-the-games-up-for-swedens-sex-trade-8548854.html

    “What happens next is a textbook example of the way Sweden’s law banning the purchase of sex works in practice. The driver of the car, who’s brought a prostituted woman to the island to have sex, is arrested on the spot. He’s given a choice: admit the offence and pay a fine, based on income, or go to court and risk publicity. The woman, who hasn’t broken any law, is offered help from social services if she wants to leave prostitution. Otherwise, she’s allowed to go.”

    sex work is work,

    “Sex work is a device that undermines the patriarchy and the institution of marriage. WE in the sex worker movement are the radical feminists. We are the mothers of the revolution.”

    Prostitution has been around for millennia, and helps prop-up the patriarchal status quo. Patriarchal society has always accepted the ‘need’ for an underclass of prostituted women, and men have always been allowed to use prostitutes. Prostitution subverts nothing.

    Reply
    1. Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette

      Dear Auntie Ploddie,

      Sweden’s laws have managed to do sweet fuck-all with their DOMESTIC prostitution situation, simply because very few prostitutes are going to turn state’s evidence against clients. Where Sweden’s laws have had some effect is in arresting and deporting foreign prostitutes. It seems that this is their actual practical purpose. Their overall effect has been to reserve the Swedish sex market for native workers – sexual protectionism, if you would.

      You simply do not understand how the “Nordic Model” works in practice. You are citing newpaper articles: my information comes direct from Brazilian prostitutes who have indeed been criminalized by the Nordic Model.

      When Swedish cops DON’T have journalists riding around with them, they do indeed haul the women down to the cop shop. And, if those women have any other criminal activities that can be held against them – particularly immigration law violations – those are brought up and they are jailed.

      Furthermore the Swedish cops ADMIT that they use ethnic profiling when they bust people. They actively apply this law to couples who don’t match Swedish notions of “ethnic purity”. Finally, without prostitutes’ evidence, they can fine all they want, but they’re not going to GET those fines upheld in court, are they? Unless they actually witness sex for money, or get prostitute’s evidence, all they’ve done is momentarily discomfitted the john and caused him to go elswewhere.

      So, once again, please bull me no shit about Sweden’s great and ground-breaking laws: harassment and arrest of clients has LONG been a tactic that many countries have used. It is nothing new.

      Regarding the decriminalization of child sexual abuse, you claim that Laura Augustin is talking about this? Where exactly?

      Let me break it down for you:

      1) Decriminalizing prostitution of minors means NOT ARRESTING MINORS and sticking them in the criminal justice system, where the U.S.’ CDC itself claims that more than 30% will face rape and sexual abuse (and I remind you, in this context, that fully 60% of minor prostitutes identify as LBGT).

      2) SEXUAL ABUSE OF MINORS, however, is a charge that still sticks to anyone paying for sex with a minor or sexually exploiting a minor.

      So no, no one here is talking about the decriminalization of sexual abuse.

      What we’re talking about is the application of your precious “Nordic Model” to the prostitution of minors: decriminalizing minors and concentrating on the criminalization of pimps and clients.

      The fact that you’re telling us that you somehow don’t get this after your ridiculous soliloquy regarding the benefits of the so-called Nordic Model is a clear demonstration that you are either stupid or arguing in bad faith.

      Finally, regarding men and their dangers….

      Certain men can be dangerous to women ANYWHERE. Johns are not particularly more or less dangerous in that respect.

      But here’s the kicker: cops have authority over prostitutes and a license to use violence on them. Johns do not. Consequently, cops are about three times more likely to rape prostitutes than johns and cop abuse of prostitutes is legendary.

      As for husbands, a marriage is a binding contract in many respects with regards to children and property. If you actually bestirred your calloused radfem ass from it’s comfortable chair in Starbucks and went out and TALKED to the women in shelters, you’ll find that the two greatest factors keeping them with batterers are a) kids and b) economics.

      Ask any prostitute you like: she’ll rate cops as far more of a risk than johns, ninety-nine out of a hundred times. And if I had a dime for every time a prostitute told me that turning tricks gave her the economic independence to leave an abusive husband, I could retire, buy your little radfem café, kick you punters out and turn it into a sex workers’ cultural center.

      So, you self-righteous little poser, it’s not that johns are LESS likely to be violent towards women: it’s that they are not imbued with ANYTHING like the institutional, infrastructural power husbands and cops have.

      Husbands, boyfriends and cops are the number one, two and three abusers of sex-working women. I repeat: criminalizing prostitution – in the guise of the Nordic Model or anything else – means turning prostitutes over to the tender mercies of the cops.

      When you pull for this, you are essentially saying that pedophiles should be put in charge of brothels because they like kiddies.

      Finally, as to your connections to the evangelical right, let’s be real, Ploddie: the radfem movement is only slightly more socially acceptable to the majority of people on this planet than prostitutes. Almost universally, you folks are viewed as a bunch of shrill, frothing fanatics, with little to say of any import whatsoever.

      Money is not flowing into the anti-trafficking movement through radfem yammerers like yourself. The evangelical Christian right, on the other hand, is becoming the primary interlocutor of the state when it comes to prostitution. We are bringing back the Magdalene Laundries, worldwide, because of this little crusade you and your Christian pals have launched.

      If you’re too stupid or too much of a fanatic to see who you’re in bed with, that’s your concern. But please don’t wheeze at me about how you have nothing to do with the Christian right when radfem organizations are busy lapping up whatever crumbs of public anti-trafficking funding the Christos have somehow missed. What little cash you get, you get solely because of the great feed ‘n fuck currently ongoing between the State and the reactionary right.

      Like I said before Auntie Ploddy, for someone who hates prostitution so much, you and your sibilings-in-struggle in the radfem movement certainly have no moral difficulties when it comes to whoring yourselves out to men who want women to be second class citizens.

      Perhaps, when it call comes down to it, this is why you claim to know so much about how prostitutes feel? Perhaps you’re just projecting onto sex workers your deep, unresolved feelings about how you’re morally whoring for the likes of Pat Robertson.

      I think that a big part of your pornophobia, Ploddie, comes from a deep lack of self-esteem. Maybe you should have that looked to by a competent psychologist and social worker, hey what?

      In the meantime, please use lots of lube and tell your Evangelical pimps we’re coming for them.

      Reply
  17. antiplondon

    “As for you so-called, self-proclaimed radical feminists and your supposed views on sex, hooray for you! That’s what makes it all the more shameful that people like you enter into political and moral alliances with the folks who want to stick women back in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. Down here in Brazil, we call the sort of stance being taken by so-called “radical feminists” such as yourself “hypocrisy”. Take a look at where the money is coming from for your new abolitionist campaign: it doesn’t come from folks like you. The main funders and organizers, on a global level, are the religious right.

    “Funny how you folks are so set against whoring and yet you have no trouble getting into bed with the folks who gave the world the Magdalene Laundries. I guess as long as they’re ponying up cash for your crusade, you can grin and bear them, neh, Plod?”

    My “supposed views on sex”? Are you saying I’m making it up, that I’m setting my self up for accusations of ‘prude’ and ‘man hater’ just for the fun of it? Do you think I’m somehow secretly in favour of coerced sex, just not in prostitution?

    Radical Feminists are not ‘in bed’ with anyone, we do not compromise any beliefs in return for this money you claim ‘we’ are getting (not that there’s any kind of radical feminist HQ to collect this putative money), and we do not support any anti-woman or anti-feminist agenda in return for this putative ‘favour’.

    The fact that, working from a different set of premises, religious people have come to the same conclusion about prostitution being a bad thing as radical feminists have, is irrelevant. Religious people are a huge part of the peace movement and the environmental movement, but nobody tries to discredit those movements for being ‘in bed’ with religious fundamentalists.

    I would have a more convincing argument for saying you are in bed with pimps and pornographers and traffickers and rapists.

    “You won’t even bother to LISTEN to a sex worker unless you can pay her to spout whatever line you’re pitching this week.”

    The claim that radical feminist pay sex industry survivors to give a falsely negative account of their experiences in the sex industry is disgusting, and clearly demonstrates the hatred and contempt so-called ‘sex positive’ sex industry advocates have for sex industry survivors.

    Any woman who speaks out about being in the sex industry risks being stigmatised and attacked by the mainstream. If a woman says she experienced abuse, and that she thinks the sex industry is abusive as an institution, and that she supports the Nordic Model, she also has to face attacks and attempts to silence and discredit her from sex industry advocates – so you are, in fact, in bed with the pimps on this one.

    antipornfeminists.wordpress.com/2013/02/11/pimps-posing-as-sex-worker-activists/

    “Contrary to your prejudiced beliefs, the vast majority of those guys aren’t rapists and aren’t pedophiles. Were they to see a child being abused in a brothel, most of them would drop a dime faster than you can yelp “Melissa Farley”.”

    So, men are dangerous within the family, within institutions that care for vulnerable children and adults, and within then police force (no disagreements from me on any of those), but johns are an extra special sub-group of men who are all lovely and somehow less dangerous than average? I’m supposed to believe that ‘most’ johns are great human beings, while ‘most’ other types of men are not? If johns were so great, there wouldn’t be any abuse within the sex industry in the first place.

    “Now here’s something I don’t understand: how does siccing the cops on adult, consenting, independent sex workers save that girl?

    “How does wasting the cops’ time, energy and funds, running down adult sex workers and clients, help that 11 year old?”

    The Nordic Model does not involve ‘siccing’ the police on prostitutes, the Nordic Model involves the decriminalisation of the prostitute herself, and the criminalisation of the john.

    Where ever the sex industry is legalised/decriminalised, you get a massive expansion of both the legal and illegal sides of the industry, you also get a massive increase in demand. Amsterdam has just voted to increase the age limit on entering prostitution, and to put curbs on the legal brothels, because they admit that their experiment in legalisation didn’t work, and didn’t protect women from harm, and didn’t prevent the involvement of children in the sex industry.

    theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/03/amsterdams-latest-quest-tame-legalized-prostitution/5072/

    The Nordic Model challenges male demand and male entitlement. The vast majority of men see sex as something they have a ‘right’ to, including sex with ‘very young girls’, and prostitution and pornography help reinforce that belief.

    The Nordic Model alone is not enough (and it is not the only thing radical feminists campaign on), but it is a step in the right direction, a world where men do not feel they have the ‘right’ to access the bodies of women and children, is one where there is going to be less rape (unless you are then going to claim that men’s sexual ‘needs’ are innate, and that rape is inevitable, and that we actually then ‘need’ prostitutes for that sexual violence to be channelled onto).

    Reply
    1. Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette

      One more thing…

      I’ve been in and out of brothels for the better part of a decade, now, collecting interviews with sex workers. I have yet to see a single brothel where “women’s bodies are sold” or where “men have the right to dominate women”.

      If you actually went into these places, you’d see that the quickest way to end up sorry and sore in a back ally is to start disrespecting the sex workers.

      You seem to have certain dominance fantasies wrapped up in your views of what actually goes on in brothels. You seem to think that the women are herded out like cattle, crying and sobbing, while men laugh at them, poke their asses and choose whips like they were choosing pool cues.

      In fact, in every brothel I’ve ever been in, the women have to WORK to get men’s attention.

      Usually, the men are there to drink and talk with other men. The women have to come right up, get in their faces and struggle to get their attention. That’s more than half the job: ask any sex worker. This pisses them off to no end.

      And when a sex is contracted for, what’s sold is a series of services, not unrestricted access to her body. Again, in most brothels, the easiest way to get your ass thoroughly kicked is to start getting fresh with a worker in a cabine.

      Doesn’t really jibe with your view of brothels as sweaty S&M dens with men just drooling over female bodies, wanting to “buy” them and abuse them, does it?

      Now, the world’s a big place and I’m sure that there are a lot of different types of brothels out there. All I can say is that in Rio de Janeiro – which certainly doesn’t have a global reputation of being particularly enlightened when it comes to gender – abusing sex workers is one of the easiest ways to get fucked over.

      This is, in fact, the MAIN reason people work brothels in the first place.

      We have independents and brothel workers in Rio. The independents keep all their cash and the brothel workers lose about 30-50% of the trick, But the independents have no back up whatsoever on the rare occasions that they deal with bad clients. And they are TOTALLY exposed to the cops, which – again – is one of their principal worries.

      It’s puzzling to me why you insist on portraying brothels as sweaty dens of S&M and ultra-female domination. It points out the fact that – for someone who’s supposedly so worried about this issue – you have no first-hand experience of it.

      It also shows off – very unflatteringly, I might add – the contorns of your own subconscience when it comes to sex.

      You are obsessed with notion of female bondage, Ploddie. You need to see it as ABSOLUTELY OCCURRING in brothels in spite of the reports of people who have the first hand experience of those places that you don’t.

      It seems to me that the reason you get your information from the media instead of directly from sex workers and brothels is that, where you to actually engage with the reality of sex work, most of your juicy little bondage fantasies would be shot straight out of the water.

      This is what I think is odd, Auntie Ploddie: you claim to be a radfem, but you have the EXACT same fantasies as the worst sort of john. You believe, like this small minority of clients, that paying for sex gives one the right to dominate a woman and use her body any way you please. You think that’s how the market works.

      The sex working women I interview have a label for people who believe the kind of shit you believe, Ploddie: psychopath.

      Reply
    2. Arum

      >Amsterdam has just voted to increase the age limit on entering prostitution, and to put curbs on the legal brothels, because they admit that their experiment in legalisation didn’t work, and didn’t protect women from harm, and didn’t prevent the involvement of children in the sex industry.

      theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/03/amsterdams-latest-quest-tame-legalized-prostitution/5072/
      <

      Nowhere in this article is there any reference to 'the involvement of children in the sex industry' in Amsterdam. You're probably trusting that nobody will check. Yet, there's simply no evidence for this.

      Then on a further note, Amsterdam has NOT voted the measures you're refering to yet. It's wrongly being reported as such by foreign media, but there has not been a formal decision as yet: it still has proposal status. Up until April 10th Amsterdam city council is still open for suggestions from all parties involved (well, at least formally).

      The accompanying information leaflet for prostitutes (also in English), can be found at amsterdam.nl/publish/pages/501114/flyer.pdf . Now here are proposed measures:

      This is what we want to change:
      • You will have safe, healthy working
      conditions and you will not be forced to
      work against your will.
      • The minimum age to work will be
      raised from 18 to 21 years.
      • You will be given care and support if
      you wish to leave the sector.
      • On weekdays the windows will close
      from 4 to 9 a.m. and during the
      weekend from 5 to 9 a.m. in order to
      prevent extremely long working hours.
      • You speak sufficient Dutch (or English,
      Spanish or German) to be able to make
      yourself understood when talking to
      customers or your employer.

      Let it be noted, that as a consequence of earlier measures, which reduced the number of available windows, room rent rates went up (good old economics law of supply and demand), sharpening the pressure on women in having to lure in more clients than before, just to make ends meet, as city council very well knows. It’s been reported officially namely.
      Yet, city council is now proposing another measure in the same vein: closure of all windows for several hours a day. As before, if the number of women remains unchanged, this will once again increase room rent rate, and once again sharpen the pressure towards making ends meet. Now, explain to me, to what extent is this helpful towards protecting women from harm, as you put it? And is this not comparable to what is usually considered typical pimp behavior? Yet, in this case it’s exactly city council, proposing to exert such pressure, while knowing about the probable consequences.
      It should be added, that it has also been officially reported to city council, that pimps (the ones with bad intentions, distinguished by the report itself from manager style pimps) usually control their women during the heavily crowded hours on the ‘grachten’, when they can easily hide from police surveillance. Now, these hours are NOT sometime between 4 AM and 9 AM. Not much goes on during those hours. So, also in this respect the measure, if indeed put into effect, will have no other result than increasing the financial pressure on the women involved.

      Remarkably, towards the end city council is refering to ‘ when talking to
      customers or your employer.’

      This is quite a slip of the tongue, considering that legally prostitutes are supposed to be working independently and are not supposed to have employers.

      Reply
    3. Arum

      antiplondon:

      > The vast majority of men see sex as something they have a ‘right’ to,<

      From this it can be concluded, that generally you're contending that noone has a right to sex, including women, is that right? Which means, that any government could impose laws, which would penalize both men and women for having sex? Or, putting it another way, not a single woman has a right to demand sex from her husband either, let alone good sex? Am I right in thinking so? And is this the general rad fem position towards sex as a human right? And if instead you feel that women do have a right to sex, then explain to me, why this right can not be granted to men.

      Reply
      1. Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette

        Auntie Ploddie, I very much doubt you talk to more than one man a year about what they think or feel with regards to sex. You are thus one of the worst people in the world to speak to what “the vast majority of men” think.

        But let me cut this Gordian knot which seems to be strangling your pea-sized intellect: people have a RIGHT to do what they want with their bodies, as long as they are not harming others.

        So if men or women WANT to have sex, that is their business and, indeed, their RIGHT.

        You – like many radfems – confuse sex, especially heterosex, with rape. Which makes me wonder exactly how much heterosex experiences you’ve actually had. Not that this matters from a moral viewpoint, but from a practical viewpoint, it says quite a lot.

        Reminds me a bit of Kant, who thought that sex could only be morally legitimate within the constrains of a monogamic relationship. He died at 80 years of age, a virgin.

        In my experience, people who claim they know what “most men” or “most women” think or feel about sex are people who’ve rarely had sex with the gender in question.

        Reply
      2. antiplondon

        Nobody, male or female, has the right to demand sex from anyone, has the right to be sexually serviced by anyone, or has the right to use economic or social inequality to manipulate, bully, blackmail or otherwise coerce a ‘yes’ from anyone. Consent should always be meaningful and freely given, submission and acquiescence do not equal meaningful consent. Simple isn’t it?

        Reply
        1. Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette

          Dear Auntie Ploddie,

          You really enjoy building and burning straw men, don’t you?

          No one here is agreeing that anyone should be having sex without consent.

          You, on the other hand, are arguing that the State needs must criminalize some forms of consensual sex between adults.

          I reiterate: if two adults want to have sex, that is not only their choice, it is their RIGHT. You and the State have absolutely no business qualifying that right.

          Simple, isn’t it?

          Reply
  18. widmerpool

    ‘The Nordic Model alone is not enough (and it is not the only thing radical feminists campaign on), but it is a step in the right direction, a world where men do not feel they have the ‘right’ to access the bodies of women and children, is one where there is going to be less rape (unless you are then going to claim that men’s sexual ‘needs’ are innate, and that rape is inevitable, and that we actually then ‘need’ prostitutes for that sexual violence to be channelled onto).’

    Two non-minors certainly have the “right” to have sexual relations, no? You keep trying to muddy the issue by conflating sex between two adults with sex between an adult and a minor.

    How does the idea of sexual “needs” being innate (they must be partly innate for both sexes since we are animals) lead to the view that rape is inevitable or that violence is channeled into prostitution? Has any “sex pozzie” ever argued along those lines?

    Reply
    1. antiplondon

      widmerpool,

      “Two non-minors certainly have the “right” to have sexual relations, no? You keep trying to muddy the issue by conflating sex between two adults with sex between an adult and a minor.”

      I’m not conflating anything. There is an obvious difference between the right for two consenting adults to engage in freely consented to and mutually enjoyable sexual activity, and the right to be sexually serviced. Most men feel entitled to the latter, and if they can’t get it from their wife/girlfriend, they feel they have a right to it through pornography or prostitution. Lot’s of men also feel they have a right to be sexually serviced by under-aged girls.

      “How does the idea of sexual “needs” being innate (they must be partly innate for both sexes since we are animals) lead to the view that rape is inevitable or that violence is channeled into prostitution? Has any “sex pozzie” ever argued along those lines?”

      The idea that prostitutes are needed for men to channel their inevitable sexual violence onto is more of a mainstream point of view than a sex-pozzer one, but since one of the main tenets of so called ‘sex positive’ thought is that nothing involving a male orgasm can ever be criticised, most ‘sex positive’ thought boils down to saying women should put up with any and all degrading or unpleasant sexual activity, or else be labelled an anti-sex prude.

      The mainstream advice to women to avoid rape, rather than advising to men to stop being rapists, characterises rape as something inevitable, a force of nature that women should avoid by never going out alone, at night etc.

      Reply
      1. Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette

        So your ultimate point seems to be that unless sex is mutually fulfilling, it is bad, Auntie Ploddie, and the State should step in and stop it?

        Is that it?

        Are you a virgin, Auntie Ploddie?

        I’d be willing to bet that the vast majority of sex is not mutually enjoyable to the same degree for both parthers. I know plenty of men and women who DO NOT particularly enjoy having sex with their partners, but do it anyway. I also know plenty of people who get paid for sex and enjoy it quite a lot.

        You’re on really shaky moral and ethical ground if you claim that you can discern sexual enjoyment. It also seems to me rather ridiculous to presume that the only possible use for sex is enjoyment. You seem as restricted in your views regarding what sex is as your far right Christian allies who think the only “proper” sex is reproductive.

        Here’s the bottom line, Ploddie: feminism states that adult women are the ones who get to decide what to do with their bodies.

        Period.

        If they decide to fuck, for whatever reason, that’s no concern of yours, mine or the State’s. If they are FORCED to fuck, against their will, then it becomes a concern of the State’s.

        But neither you nor the police have any right to tell anyone what an adult can or cannot do with their body, as long as they are not hurting anyone else. THAT is feminism, fool. You are obviously not a feminist, for all your posings.

        And while I agree that there are a lot of asshole men out there, there’s no substantial proof whatsoever that prostitution or porn is making these men into assholes. Some men have always been violent to women forever – this was the case LONG before porn existed and even long before prostitution existed. There is no evidence at all that porn or prostitution has resulted in more violence towards women. The most well known battleground for this violence, by the way, is marriage and domestic partnerships, not prostitution. There is much more evidence linking domestic relationships between men and women to violence against women than there is linking prostitution to violence against women.

        Yet for some reason, we never see you so-called radfems calling for the State to ban marriage, do we? In fact, if you are like most so-called “radfems” I know, you’re busy rooting for marriage to be extended to ALL couples. You are, in fact, almost certainly as much of a marriage idealist as your Christian pals.

        But here’s another interesting point, Ploddie: some of the WORST entitlement-minded men are precisely your far right evangelical Christian allies. Why you feel comfortable taking the same line these men is beyond me.

        No one here has EVER argued that “prostiutes are needed for men to channel their sexual violence”, by the way, so please take that particular disgusting strawman and go burn it in your Christian buddies’ balliwick. What we ARE arguing here is that sex work should be decriminalized in order to BETTER PROTECT sex workers from abuse by clients, pimps and particularly the cops.

        We are labeling you an anti-sex prude because you are against 95% of really occurring human sex. It seems that the only kind of sex you are in favor of is mutually fulfilling sex between two equally positioned partners where there’s no power differential to be seen, whatsoever. That, Ploddie, is a view of sex that is unrealistic. And to the degree that you want the state to enthrone your views of sex, arresting those men and women who disagree with them and dare to use their bodies in other ways, you are, indeed, the worst sort of prude.

        Reply
      2. nada

        lol… You have no idea. If you are not well behaved, you are unlikely to get anything from sex workers either- and the sex worker will probably threaten your job, family, and publicly shame them if they are terrible – unlike girlfriends or wives that have sex for free without much negotiation, people have to actually negotiate exactly what they will do , won’t do , time, place, and money .

        this stinks of your own sexual issue/ insecurities about what you feel about sexuality and man – NOTHING about actually helping marginalized community to have better lives which is what is being discussed.

        Reply
      3. Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette

        Dear Auntie Ploddy,

        First of all, neither you nor I nor anyone posting here know what “most men” think. There are several good studies out there, hoiwever, that salient an important fact: most men do NOT rape.

        Sorry for rainiong on your misandrist parade, but there it is.

        Secondly, I DO happen to know something about johns, having interviewed a huge number of them and watched many more in action. Their reasons for buying sex are incredibly diverse.

        However, in watching johns for over a decade, I have encountered precisely ZERO who believe they “have a right” to sex with underage children. Nothing indicates that these men are any more likely to be pedophiles than other men or even radical feminists. When you make your spurious claims about these guys, you are simply using the stigma attached to prostitution to try and tar and feather them with the label “pedophiles”.

        Now, with regards to rape, I’m sure you’ll find rapists among johns – JUST LIKE YOU FIND RAPISTS AMONG ANY GROUP OF HUMAN BEINGS.

        Are rapists more prevalent among johns than any other group?

        I’d say no. Again cops are more likely to rape sex workers than johns – much more likely. That’s a disturbing fact when you consider that pros encounter far many more johns in their lives than cops.

        But I do think it might be possible to say that prostitution attracts many more men who pros qualify as “psychos” and that prostitutes are more vulnerable to rape than non-prostitutes. This vulnerability is due to the fact that the State considers prostitute women to be a criminal or quasi-criminal class and – particularly in the U.S. – gices no protection to prostitutes.

        If a person IS a rapist, prostitutes thus become a logical category to attack: they can’t report the attacks to the police wiothout fear of being ar rested themselves, can they? And even in abolitionist Brazil, prostitutes will not be listened to, more often than not, when reporting rape.

        So I agree that prostitutes may suffer far more rape than non-prostitutes. The factor driving this, however, is not some general male misogyny, but a much more specific pornophobia that’s being enabled by the likes of you. Criminalization policies make prostitutes more vulnerable to rape: not misogyny in general.

        As for your belief that sex positive feminists believe that the male orgasm is sacrosanct, that’s simply a laughable attempt at forging an ad hominem. It does indeed seem to me, however, that your views on sexuality can be boiled down to an essentialism that’s even more crude than the stereotype you’re trying to criticize.

        You seem to believe that male sexuality is so homogenous and threatening that we might as well classify it as a “force of nature”. After all, here you are, claiming that “most men” believe this and “most men” believe that, that “most men” feel entitled to rape…

        Christ, Ploddy: what’s the difference between your views on male sexuality and those of the mainstream you criticize?

        Reply
  19. Laura Agustín

    To clarify certain terms: The UN Convention on Rights of the Child (1989) defines everyone under 18 as a child. Some people therefore have only two terms in their vocabulary: adult and child. Other people continue to use other terms that aid understanding of particular situations, such as adolescent, teenager, pubescent, young adult and so on. In many countries where child labour of all kinds is a mainstay of family existence, even very young children’s working for money is felt to be necessary and a right. The ILO itself backed off from campaigning against all ‘child labour’ for this reason and focuses on the most dangerous jobs as defined by themselves. Furthermore, in many countries people are considered sexually mature at 13, 14, 15, and they may have sex with others their age or younger or older. That’s a description of what happens, whether money or benefits come into it or not.

    Reply
    1. antiplondon

      Brilliant non-answer there Agustin, so I can take it that you are fine with 13-year-old children prostituting, or at least 13-year-old non-white, non-western children.

      Reply
      1. Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette

        You obviously take answers any way you want to, Ploddie, including straight up your arse.

        Let me translate Laura for you, mmm’kay?

        Who is and who is not an adult, and thus able to marry, work, engage in prostitution, is contested in the real world – you know, that big place outside your coffee house.

        I’ve talked to 17 year old prostitutes in the Brazilian northeast who were widows, raising two children already. And while I think such people probably shouldn’t be doing sex work, if there are no other opportunities made open to them, they probably will. Arresting those people doesn’t suddenly make them “safe”.

        That’s the REALITY behind what we’re talking about here.

        Now let’s take your perrenial example of a 13 year old forced into prostitution.

        How do the police being allowed to arrest, stigmatize and institutionalize her help her situation? Why isn’t it enough that the police arrest and imprison her kidnappers and the men haveing sex with her?

        This is the point you keep dodging, Ploddie.

        So can we take it that you are fine with placing chilcren in institutions that routinely end up sexually assaulting them? Can we take it that you are fine, ultimately, with the rape and battery of thirteen year old girls as long as it happens in a duly approved social institution, such as a police station or halfway home?

        Reply
  20. Gaye Dalton

    There is literally only ONE way to stop minors selling or bartering sex for survival (as I once had to barter sex for my own – usually involves a lot more anal than straightforward selling sex BTW).

    Very simple…examine the structures in place for distressed and abused minors and pour whatever money it takes into ensuring that they are better, less abusive, less distressing, less painful and more compassionate than selling or bartering sex to survive, because currently, even in most parts of the “civilised” world, those structures are NOT EVEN CLOSE.

    Minors are very simple, basic people, they sell, or barter sex because it hurts less than the alternatives. When I was 14 girls my own age volunteered themselves (no coercion, no “evil pimps”) to barter or sell sex to survive to escape the greater abuse and distress of the care system. Others committed suicide for the same reason.

    For most teens the only available alternative to selling sex is uncannily similar to an adult prison sentence intended to *PUNISH* older, stronger people…except the teen is accorded less human rights and the “carers” have less accountability.

    So the teen, who is far from a stupid animal, takes the line of least resistance, follows the least distressing path, and sells or barters sex instead, wherever they can. Every teen in care could (but won’t) tell you where there are secret venues in which they can sell themselves, voluntarily, to escape the brutality of the care system.

    I couldn’t avail of them, because I looked 20 at age 14…but I could barter sex for support from lonely, hopeless men instead…and I did…and THANK GOD I could…of I would never have lived to tell the tale.

    There is no need to coerce teens into selling sex, because the shortcomings of the state system can be counted upon to do that for you.

    Punitive action against an adult sex industry that is not only irrelevant to minors but usually geared to identifying and avoiding employing minors will do absolutely NOTHING to help minors at all, and will harm some as their mother’s earning capacity, and hence her capacity to nurture and protect them in decimated.

    Get the state care system in order and fit for purpose if you want to stop teens selling sex…it is the ONLY way that works.

    If you want to “end the demand” for underage sex identify and humanely destroy pedophiles, because normal sex work clients would cut their throats rather than touch a child, just like other human beings.

    Reply
    1. antiplondon

      Gaye Dalton,

      I am very sorry to hear about your terrible experience, and I agree completely that the ‘care’ system needs to be reformed in many parts of the world.

      But, defining a ‘normal’ john, as one who wouldn’t touch a child, defines out of existence the johns who do touch children, and accounts from other sex industry survivors suggest that there is not such a neat and convenient divide.

      Reply
      1. Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette

        No, that is bullshit.

        Saying that the average, normal john is not a pedophile DOES NOT define out of existence johns who sexually abuse children.

        In fact, it CLARIFIES the situation quite considerably. LEt me show you how:

        “John”: a person who pays for sex with an adult, consenting sex worker.

        “Rapist”: a person who has sex – for pay or no – with a non-consenting person.

        “Child abuser”: a person who has sex with a child. Again, money has nothing to do with this definition.

        We want police to concentrate on the last two categories. We think that if they took even HALF the money they currently use to chase adult, consenting johns and pros and applied it to going after kiddie fiddlers and rapists, you’d soon see a significant improvement in women’s security.

        Your problem, ploddy, is that you want to use the State to REFORM people’s sexuality until it’s all cuddly and nice. That is never going to happen.

        As for “sex industry survivors”, again, I call bullshit. I have talked to literally hundreds of sex workers. That’s a bit more empirically based than you listening to one paid activist of your radfem pals talking about their experiences. I’ve been in and out of dozens of brothels. I have NEVER seen a brothel offering up 13 year old kiddies to be raped. In fact, it’s very hard to find MINOR sex workers in Rio de Janeiro. The handful one encounters tend to be 17 and 16 – very rarely 15. And they are generally not working in brothels.

        This is something you anti-sex idiots never understand: most brothels are absolutely TERRIFIED of hiring minors. They don’t need to. There are plenty of adult women who’ll work for sex and the price is the same, no matter the age. A minor in a brothel, even if she’s 17, is a LIABILITY. In the very “best” of circumstances, it opens up the brothel owner to massive police bribing. In the worst of circumstances, it ends with her in jail for up to twenty years.

        Again, there’s no need to criminalize prostituon: simply getting the cops to go after the men and women who hire minors for sex is more than enough, if your goal is to keep adolescents from being “sexually abused”.

        Reply
      2. Gaye Dalton

        I am not a “sex industry survivor” I am a person who sold and bartered sex to survive real trauma and desperation, and if I could not have done that (as per the intent of the Nordic Model) at several different times in my life, there is literally no way I would have survived at all.

        I have seen the culture of “sex industry survivors” – and all I see are ruthless, blatantly manipulative opportunists saying whatever the abolitionist industry is willing to pay them for, directly or indirectly…none of them stand up to the slightest scrutiny…even when the scrutiny is my own as an objective eyewitness.

        I am simply not stupid enough to believe them against the evidence of my own eyes, and I am not corrupt enough to take the indirect bribes that have been offered by the abolitionist industry to join them. (I might be willing to rent out my body, but *NEVER* my principles).

        It is not reasonable to even suggest people who know the truth first hand affect to believe opportunistic lies instead.

        Pedophiles crave children…normal men do not, and sex work clients are just normal men, who would rather pay a consenting adult a fair wage than study “Pick Up Artist” literature and notch their bedposts at the expense of any emotional vulnerable women they could find.

        Reply
  21. antiplondon

    Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette,

    “You simply do not understand how the “Nordic Model” works in practice. You are citing newpaper articles: my information comes direct from Brazilian prostitutes who have indeed been criminalized by the Nordic Model.”

    It doesn’t come from Sweden then does it?

    “Regarding the decriminalization of child sexual abuse, you claim that Laura Augustin is talking about this? Where exactly?”

    In this post:

    https://www.lauraagustin.com/childhood-trafficking-research-agency-and-cultural-contradictions

    where she says:

    “The following comments reveal some of the contradictions experienced while trying to work within the framework of ‘trafficked children’. The study was funded by the US National Institute of Justice ‘to examine the experiences of children, mostly girls, trafficked to the United States for sexual and labor exploitation and analyze their prospects for reintegration.’ I make many of the same comments in my book Sex at the Margins and am glad to see that numerous other researchers are now writing about cultural differences that mean that campaigns to save young people from doing paid work often oppress and make them unhappy.”

    Agustin is very clearly saying that it is oppressive to stop children doing ‘sex work’, and from her non-answer above she seems to be happy with 13-year-olds, at least, engaging in ‘sex work’.

    “What we’re talking about is the application of your precious “Nordic Model” to the prostitution of minors: decriminalizing minors and concentrating on the criminalization of pimps and clients.”

    But hang on, won’t that drive it underground, and into the hands of criminals (a different set of criminals that is)?

    “As for husbands, a marriage is a binding contract in many respects with regards to children and property. If you actually bestirred your calloused radfem ass from it’s comfortable chair in Starbucks and went out and TALKED to the women in shelters, you’ll find that the two greatest factors keeping them with batterers are a) kids and b) economics.”

    I am fully aware of what keeps women in abusive relationships (you left out c. the risk of the man killing them/their children if they tried to leave), where did I say it didn’t have anything to do with economics? Also, you have no idea how much involvement/experience I have with battered women, or battered women’s shelters, so maybe you should consider the effect your spiteful vicious comments might have on the very large number of women who count as both radical feminist and victims of domestic violence.

    “Finally, as to your connections to the evangelical right, let’s be real, Ploddie: the radfem movement is only slightly more socially acceptable to the majority of people on this planet than prostitutes. Almost universally, you folks are viewed as a bunch of shrill, frothing fanatics, with little to say of any import whatsoever.”

    And yet you hate us so much, and so rabidly, even though we are, according to you, marginal and powerless.

    “Like I said before Auntie Ploddy, for someone who hates prostitution so much, you and your sibilings-in-struggle in the radfem movement certainly have no moral difficulties when it comes to whoring yourselves out to men who want women to be second class citizens.”

    Your insults are becoming more rabid and more hateful with every paragraph, they don’t make you look very good, let alone convincing. Name-calling is not an argument.

    “I’ve been in and out of brothels for the better part of a decade, now, collecting interviews with sex workers. I have yet to see a single brothel where “women’s bodies are sold” or where “men have the right to dominate women”.”

    I have read enough accounts from trafficking survivors and sex industry survivors to know that that is the case in a lot of places. Like the brothels in London that help traffickers keep trafficked women captive by not letting them leave.

    guardian.co.uk/law/2011/apr/19/sex-trafficking-uk-legal-reform

    Or is the woman in this article lying because radical feminists paid her to? Are you happy to discredit her and other women and girls like her? Is she an unfortunate one-off, and the rest of the time those brothels were great places to work, and those gangs were benign people-smugglers?

    “This is what I think is odd, Auntie Ploddie: you claim to be a radfem, but you have the EXACT same fantasies as the worst sort of john.”

    Yeah, that’s right, I’m anti-prostitution and anti-pornography and anti-BDSM and anti-any kind of sexual coercion because I secretly love the idea of women getting abused, you are so profound and wise! You are an amazing mind reader! Or, you’re just a bully-boy who layers on the rabid insults because you think that’s a convincing way to discredit someone you disagree with.

    “The sex working women I interview have a label for people who believe the kind of shit you believe, Ploddie: psychopath.”

    I’m a psychopath now am I? What next, are you going to accuse me of going out and physically harming prostitutes?

    Reply
    1. nada

      antiplondon- yes, what you suggest physically harm sex workers that is why we are all against it. You believe everything the christian right from USA is telling you in the media, and in turn what the world media chose to spread – only to neglect people like Laura who actually spoke with sex workers and peer sex work organizations , and indeed you ignore sex workers themselves. Instead, due to your severe prejudice and patronizing attitude towards sex work allows you only to hear the victim stories that are being sold to enforce dangerous laws.

      You only have to look at Kony 2000 and “censor internet” campaigns in the name of “child pornography” or “poor african children” to understand that you are a puppet of mass media and spinning your own content as you refuse to listen to workers who are obviously not trafficked nor taken advantage of. There fore, you sound completely out of your mind. You sound completely out of your mind when arguing with people who has worked with sex workers and sex worker themselves that you know better because ” I read accounts” and ” I read a news article that said there was one such brothel” . so you know more than people that have been in the industry for 20 years in ALL kinds of sex work around the world that for SURE that most people are terribly abused and trafficked??? Sorry- you don’t know. You are prejudiced and refuse to listen to people with much more experience about what needs to happen in their OWN ENVIRONMENT. Not just ASSUMED point of view that you come from.

      As far as I can see, the rad fem movement has nothing to do with doing good – they are just concerned with who is having sex with whom- and only concerned with that issue- they know very well they harm sex workers. That is indeed exactly what they intend to do while claiming to “help them” . I call these types who pick and endanger marginalized groups “scum of the earth”.

      Reply
    2. Gaye Dalton

      But antiplondon you admit that you want to control and dictate the lives of women who know more about sex work, and themselves than you ever will.

      You state that you want them to suborn their will, attitudes and experience to opportunistic liars.

      You state that you want laws to coerce them out of their chosen paid occupation in a recession with few if any occupational alternatives.

      Pardon me if that doesn’t sound very empathetic.

      Reply
    3. Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette

      Actually, Auntie Plodon, my information about the Nordic Model does indeed come direct from Sweden. In three ways…

      First, it comes from the Swedish government stats themselves. You can look them up and see how successful they’ve been in prosecuting sex work consumers: not very.

      Secondly, they come straight from the horse’s mouth in the words of the chief of police of Gothemburg and Sweden’s anti-trafficking ambassador, who have told me flat out that they use ethnic profiling when making arrests and do their best to use women’s immigration status to force them to turn state’s evidence.

      Finally, they come from Brazilian prostitutes who’ve been to Sweden and been arrested in the course of the implementation of the Nordic model.

      This last point reveals your contempt for prostitutes, by the way. You QUOTE me talking about it and then dismiss that information as irrelevant because “it doesn’t come from the Swedish goverment”.

      In other words, what the Swedish State says is more important, to you, than what actual prostitutes caught in its web say.

      As for your comments on what Agustin is supposedly “clearly” saying, are you dyslexic, or just stupid?

      She is most clearly NOT saying minors doing sex work is a good thing: she IS saying that interventions often create situations that are EVEN WORSE.

      How could that be true?

      Well, taking a kid off the street and sticking them in a cage where they are physically abused and raped isn’t “rescue” or “salvation”, is it? And yet this is exactly what many anti-minor sex work interventions do.

      Here in Brazil, we had the cops raid a trans lodging house to “save” three minor trans. The 50 odd people in the house were all beaten by the poiice, including the “saved” minors. They were all put on the street and lost their belongings and documents. The three trans kids got put on a bus to Belem, their home town, where two of them were under a death sentence. The three told reporters that they would do their best to get off the bus befor they arrived in Belem and come back to SP to avoid being killed.

      So here’s a clear example of a salvationist campign that oppresses and makes the young people “saved” unhappy. To critique this and show why it doesn’t work – as Laura does – isn’t the same thing as saying kids should be doing sex work.

      As for applying the Nordic Model to juvenile prostitution, juvenile sex work is ALREADY underground. My problem with the nordic model, furthermore, isn’t that it drives sex work underground, but that it is useless for its stated purposes and is only used to harass sex workers. The nordic model IS useful as a means of identifying and deporting foreign sex workers, which seems to be its main function. For that it works just great!

      So when it comes to identifying ENSLAVED CHILD SEX WORKERS, I’m sure it’ll work beautifully. Tell cops to not arrest kids but to refer them to social services they can use and meanwhile ARREST [and not just fine] the people having sex with them? That seems to me to be a pretty good model. If the kid is enslaved and brutalized, as you say, then it should be very easy to get them to turn state’s evidence. That doesn’t happen when the prostitute is an adult, consenting sex worker.

      As for your experience with battered women, I have a pretty good idea that it is little to nil. Only someone who has zero practical experience with battered women could make some of the claims you’re making.

      I don’t hate radfems, actually: I think you people are amusing. I hate the Christian right and I despise your alliance with it. But as for you radfems yourself, you are as laughable and essentially innocuous as the Men’s Rights Activists. You have no power at all, unless it is that of being a convenient foil for rightwing assholes who want to show a “wide consensus” when they call for laws that harm sex workers.

      Radfems are a pathetic little “members only” club, Ploddie. I save my hate for movements that are far more powerful than that.

      Name-calling is not an argument?

      Sister, you’ve been name-calling since you stepped up to bat here, so you have no cause to cry bitter tears of sorrow that your own medicine is now being returned right down your snaggle-toothed pie hole.

      If you don’t like having ad hominems applied to you, then quit tossing them around yourself, as if they were party favors at a coming out ball. Either start discoursing civilly and logically or shut the fuck up and expect to receive what you dish out.

      Either way is fine by me.

      But for you to call me a john and say that Laura likes kiddie-fiddlers and then whine that you don’t like being called names yourself…. Please, Auntie. Go whine to the “trigger warning” crowd.

      As for your comfortable reading about sexual exploiitation in your London cafes, that’s all very nice.

      It’s comendable that you read the accounts of trafficking survivors, but the vast majority of women in prostitution aren’t trafficked. Again, trying to make sense of prostituion by exclusively looking at enslaved children and women is like trying to make sense of marriage by exclusively looking at battered women and children. You take the minority as average and forget that the main problems are male supremacy, heteronormativity and capitalism and not the exchange of sex for money – in or outside of wedding bans.

      I reiterate: I do not only READ about these things, I’m in and out of brothels, constantly. I haven’t found a single sex slave yet and I’ve seen very, very few underage prostitutes – all those in the 16-17 age bracket.

      Do you know WHERE I’ve seen the largest numbers of child prostitues? Not in the brothels or in the streets, but in the family-oriented bars and restraunts of Copacabana, where they blend in among the tourist and family groups during the day time

      Pedophiles are compulsive and will seek out children. They are not welcome in brothels and most johns I’ve met would happily turn them into police were they to be discovered. A Rio de Janeiro brothel, in fact, is probably one of the most dangerous places on earth for a pedo to go stalking. If he’s uncovered, the least he can expect is to be handed over to the cops.

      In other words, you are simply wrong to presume that whores, johns and madames are happy to see children be exploited and women beaten and enslaved. You are taking a handful of marginal cases and presuming that the sensational is, in fact, the majority..

      Contrary to what you might think, the majority of brothel owners – the vast majority – DO NOT WANT kids on the premises. They bring in no more money and put everyone at risk from the law.

      A brothel, I’ll remind you, is set up to make money. Kids and sex slaves do not bring in any more cash than consenting adults. Furthermore – and this is presuming that the brothel owner is an evil bastard, totally devoid of human sentiment, which most are not, in my experience – they aren’t needed at all: there are always more adult women willing to sell sex than men willing to buy it in most brothels I’ve been in. Why, in heaven’s name, would a borthel owber risk twenty years in jail, given this situation? Because he’s ideologically in favor of the rape of children?

      Worse: all it would take is ONE person to call the police if a child or sex slave were to be found in a brothel… and men and women are entering and leaving brothels by the dozens all day long. They are very public establishments. Cops in Rio LOVE to have an excuse to raid brothels. If they are good cops, it’s a chance to get a nice little star for promotion if they find children of slaves. For the corrupt cops, it’s an unparralled opportunity to extort a golden handshake.

      In short, EVERYONE has a motive to drop a dime on sexual slavery in Rio brothels and no one has any desire to encourage it. It makes no one any significant profit and it’s incredibly risky.

      The very few times I’ve seen prostitutes who seem to be minors in knocking shops in Rio they were all…

      1) People who could pass for adults (indeed, I don’t really know for sure that they were not – I was giving them the bennefit of the doubt, so to speak);

      2) In very marginal, not profitable, brothels which all were quickly closed – either through market forces or the police.

      My hypothesis is that these marginal sex workers most probably either have bullet-proof fake I.D. or are working for brothel owners who are desperate enough to accept anyone as a worker, as long as they look plausibly like an adult. And these occurrences are very, very rare.

      Again, I see nothing in this situation that would be improved by criminalization and eveything that would be improved by treating pros as workers and citizens.

      Your problem, Ploddie, is that you are trying to apply marginal cases to the mainstream of prostitution. It would be MUCH BETTER to use the resources wasted repressing the mainstream and applying them instead to the marginal cases. Again, in that Guardian article you cite, the police ALREADY HAD all the tools they needed to resolve that case without needing to criminalize prostitution. In fact, if you actually READ the case histories of sexually exploited women, you’ll note that most of them have been arrested by the police multiple times. Obviously, then, illegalization doesn’t stop the trafficking and enslavement of sex workers. Concentrating the resoureces spent on go after these women on going after slavers instead just might bring better results.

      By the way, I think brothels are piss-poor places to work, usually. And so are fast food restaraunts. Improvement of working conditions, however, isn’t going to happen unless prostitution is decriminalized. Making prostitution illegal CERTAINLY does nothing to either eliminate prostitution or to improve working conditions.

      Finally, yeah, actually I think there’s a pretty good chance that imagining women being abused gets you hot, Ploddie. You spend so much time imagining it occurring in places that it doesn’t hardly ever happen that there’s really no other logical explanation.

      Like most deeply closeted fetishists, you try to project off onto despised and degraded others (pimps, johns, “pro-sex feminists”, men in general) those things you find deeply aborhent in yourself. Of course, we’ll never know for sure, but I bet if we had the police raid YOUR digs, we’d find a big box of well-thumbed bodice-rippers, carefully hidden away under your bed. And I can only imagine what we’d find on your hard drive. “The Human Centipede” is probably the least fo it. Of course, it’ll all be filed in a folder carefully labeled “Research”…

      Just a hypothesis, mind you, but one that fits your behavior, as displayed here.

      Thank you for calling me a “bully boy”, by the way! The term originally referred to the men and boys prostitutes hired to keep unruly clients in line and to protect them from the occasional psychopath. To me, it’s a decent term and deserves to be recovered. I make no money off of pros, mind you, but I’m happy to do my part to defend sex workers’ rights and reputations from the likes of you, who can only conceive of them as criminals, deserving of police brutality.

      Being called a “bully boy” by a pornophobic, violence-enabler who attacks prostitutes is a high compliment, indeed! I’d much rather be a bully boy than someone like you, a garden variety BULLY who targets the vulnerable for hate and violence.

      You, a psycho? Heavens forfend, Auntie Ploddie! You are a loud-mouthed jerk who just happens to AGREE with the psychopathic view of prostitutes as women who should be targeted for violence and “punished”. Give psychos their due: they at least bestir their fat asses and engage with the real world, albeit in a horrible and violent way. You, by contrast, sit safely ensconced in a virtual cocoon, sucking down pop-media stories about violence against prostitutes, safe in your air-conditioned, privileged bubble.

      You aren’t a psycho, Ploddie: you’re just a fan-girl for psychos.

      Reply
  22. laura agustin Post author

    Everyone: If you include hot links your message gets held up in a moderation queue. Better to make them non-hot but copiable and messages display immediately.

    Reply
  23. Iamcuriousblue

    Anti – Good grief, all you offer is the same shrill, self-righteous dogma that your movement has been spewing since the 1970s, along with the usual groundless accusations that those who oppose are pimps, abusers, pedophiles, or some combination thereof. And the usual claptrap about what the Nordic model and radical feminism is supposed to be as some Platonic ideal, with a total refusal to engage with how such ideas function in the real world, and how people experience sex and sex work in the real world, which is a great deal more varied and nuanced than your closed, dogmatic mind is capable of processing.

    Why don’t you and your “sisters” take your empty dogmatism and piss off to some “women’s land” or separatist space, which is clearly the only place you people have any hope of functioning. You offer absolutely zero solutions to anybody else in the real world, and in fact, accomplish little more than adding to the harm done to already marginalized people.

    Reply
  24. antiplondon

    Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette,

    “Are you a virgin, Auntie Ploddie?”

    Wow, you are really getting desperate with the insults.

    I don’t think sex has to be ‘perfect’ but I do think it needs to include meaningful, enthusiastic consent, not acquiescence for the sake of survival (or even for the sake of a quiet life).

    The ‘right to do whatever you like with your body’ is a funny one really. On a theoretical level, yes, we all have the right to do absolutely anything we like with our bodies, including mutilating and poisoning them, and committing suicide, but most people balk at condoning the conditions that lead people to self-harm and suicide, even while they don’t condemn the self-harmer or the suicide.

    Do women have a right to poor quality or boring sex? I suppose so, but it’s not really a ‘right’ worth fighting for, any more than the right to drink oneself to death.

    Without economic coercion there would be no prostitution, that much is self-evident; a ‘yes’ gained through economic coercion is not a meaningful ‘yes’ – why not be honest, and say that you are happy with women who have no other realistic alternatives submitting to unwanted sex in exchange for economic survival?

    There is a physical and psychological reality to sex, and there is a physical and psychological reality to submitting to unwanted sex. I’m sure the women you ‘interview’ are aware of that reality, but why would they tell you about it?

    Do you fight for the right for men to ‘choose’ to work down mines they know will collapse on them, or to ‘choose’ to work with factory equipment they know will tear their arms off, because they’re poor and there are no other jobs available, and they have the right to do anything they want with their body?

    And to pre-empt your reply, a miner is not paid x amount to allow a mine to be collapsed on him, and a factory worker is not paid x amount to stick his arms in the machinery, the harm is an avoidable by-product of the work that can be avoided with basic health and safety measures. The sex industry provides the only ‘work’ where the danger and hazards and abuse is the actual work.

    It’s funny how so-called ‘sex positives’ only ever come to two conclusions about sex, either sex means nothing, so having to do it when you don’t want to is no big deal, or all sex is good, even coerced sex, neither of which are particularly ‘positive’.

    “Yet for some reason, we never see you so-called radfems calling for the State to ban marriage, do we? In fact, if you are like most so-called “radfems” I know, you’re busy rooting for marriage to be extended to ALL couples. You are, in fact, almost certainly as much of a marriage idealist as your Christian pals.”

    You clearly don’t know any real radical feminists in real life then (I think you are confused and think it means any woman you don’t agree with), because no radical feminist ‘idealises’ marriage, and we all know that the most dangerous men in a woman’s life are the ones she is closely connected to.

    If you are talking about the extension of marriage rights to same-sex couples, that hardly puts us in bed with Christian fundamentalists does it!

    “You obviously take answers any way you want to, Ploddie, including
    straight up your arse.”

    Hang on, weren’t you just accusing me of being a virgin? And nice use of sexually violent language there, you are such a Nice Guy.

    “Let me translate Laura for you, mmm’kay?

    “Who is and who is not an adult, and thus able to marry, work, engage in prostitution, is contested in the real world – you know, that big place outside your coffee house.”

    Ah, I see now, you say you’re against child prostitution, but then you argue down the age of who actually counts as a child, with the wonderful fix-all of ‘cultural norms’ – no wonder you don’t see any child prostitution, because you don’t see any children.

    “So can we take it that you are fine with placing chilcren in institutions that routinely end up sexually assaulting them? Can we take it that you are fine, ultimately, with the rape and battery of thirteen year old girls as long as it happens in a duly approved social institution, such as a police station or halfway home?”

    Your accusation that I am happy with thirteen-year-olds being sexually assaulted or otherwise brutalised (as long as it’s not within prostitution), is ridiculous and you have nothing to support such a disgusting accusation, just an endless litany of insults and name-calling.

    The legal stance a country takes towards prostitution has no causative connection to the quality of its welfare provisions for homeless under-eighteens (actually, let’s say under-fourteens, since any older than that and you start counting them as an adult); any country that has any kind of welfare system isn’t going to start leaving under- fourteens on the streets just because it has decriminalised ‘sex work’ for over- fourteens.

    Your accusation that the Nordic Model would cause more institutionalised abuse of under-fourteens is false. Bringing in the Nordic Model will not criminalise underage prostitutes, it will not cause underage prostitutes to be arrested and sent to prison; it will not somehow cause welfare provisions for homeless under-fourteens to get worse.

    A country that has any kind of welfare provisions at all is not going to leave children homeless, and that has no connection to the legal status of prostitution. If the welfare provisions provided are poor (as I am sure they are in nearly every country in the world) that isn’t connected to the legal status of prostitution in that country, and decriminalisation of the sex industry for over-fourteens is not a prerequisite for improving welfare provisions for under-fourteens.

    How is decriminalising prostitution for over-fourteens going to stop homeless under-fourteens being the legal responsibility of the state? If the state (or an NGO provider) doesn’t intervene in the lives of homeless under-fourteens, and they won’t be able to survive through prostitution (because all the ‘good johns’ will be out performing instantaneous citizen’s arrests on the child abusing ‘not-johns’) how do those homeless under-fourteens survive?

    You set up the false dichotomy of the Nordic Model + abusive state on the one hand, and, on the other, total decriminalisation of the sex industry (for over-fourteens) + what exactly? A welfare system that is magically improved, just through the decriminalisation of the adult sex industry? Homeless children magically surviving on thin air?

    How a society protects its most vulnerable members is a real issue, but it is not directly tied to the legal status of adult prostitution; a homeless child surviving through prostitution would be the legal responsibility of the state regardless of the legal status of the adult sex industry.

    ““Child abuser”: a person who has sex with a child. Again, money has nothing to do with this definition.”

    Really? So if a man is paying to have sex with a homeless under-fourteen, that is completely irrelevant? The exchange of money that facilitates that rape is irrelevant? The fact that if that child was not homeless, and not in dire straights, so that that man would not be able to use money to facilitate the rape of that child, is irrelevant?

    If that child was prostituting on the same street corner as adults, and that john, on other occasions, had paid to have sex with an adult, then that still has nothing to do with prostitution? If that child was being controlled by a pimp, who took money from the rapist, that still has nothing to do with prostitution?

    I know it’s part of your ideology to insist that all johns are lovely, and that it’s only the occasional ‘bad apple’ who commits abuse, but this is getting silly.

    “As for “sex industry survivors”, again, I call bullshit. I have talked to literally hundreds of sex workers. That’s a bit more empirically based than you listening to one paid activist of your radfem pals talking about their experiences.”

    Wow, more shameless silencing and discrediting of any ex-prostitute who doesn’t follow your party line, by accusing her of being paid to tell a particular story.

    I’m sure you have talked to hundreds of ‘sex workers’, and I’m sure a lot of them have told you whatever they thought you wanted to hear – if a woman didn’t feel ’empowered’ by ‘sex work’, if she did feel abused and powerless, why would she tell you about it?

    Reply
    1. nada

      just read this as well :

      In Sweden, it is a crime to buy sex and this has adversely affected street sex workers. As one report says: ‘Swedish street prostitutes experience a tougher time. They are more frequently exposed to dangerous clients, while the serious clients are afraid of being arrested… They have less time to assess the client as the deal takes place very hurriedly due to fear on the part of the client… If the client demands unprotected sex, many of the prostitutes cannot afford to say no. Harassment by the police has increased and the clients no longer provide tip-offs about pimps, for fear of being arrested themselves.’6
      ‘The Swedish Sex Purchase Act: Claimed Success and Documented Effect’, by Susanne Dodillet and Petra Oestergren. Conference paper presented at the international workshop Decriminalizing Prostitution and Beyond: Practical Experiences and Challenges. The Hague, 3-4 March 2011.

      None of the Swedish model actually help sex workers – underage, pimped, abused, or NOT.

      Reply
    2. Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette

      Auntie Ploddie, maybe you should have more sex in a committed relationship and out of it before you go philosophizing about what it should and shouldn’t be? Because given what you seem to think about it, as expressed here, it’s pretty hard to escape the conclusion that you haven’t actually fucked much in your life, if at all.

      “Enthusiastic consent”? Just how does one measure that, exactly? What does that even mean? And, by the way, according to the many johns I’ve interviewed, prostitutes can be far more enthusiastic than many other bedmates, at least by any measureable, objective standard.

      No one’s fighting for anyone’s right to poor sex and bad qwork, by the way. We are fighting for people’s rights to not have YOU – or any other self-styled moral watchdog – tell them what to do with their bodies.

      That is an entirely different kettle of fish, Ploddie.

      As for work conditions under capitalism, if you want the worst aspects of prstitution to dissappear, dymp capitalism. If you don’t do that, nothing you do will ever get rid of the worst aspects of prostitution.

      You seem to forget that we have already had plenty of experiences with criminalization of prostitution in the world, Ploddie and NOTHING – not even your precious Swedish model – has gotten rid of it or even greatkly ameliorated it.

      What does ameliorate prostitution? Good, meaningful work that’s well paid and education that’s free and plentiful, plus rights and respect for prostitutes.

      Period.

      So it seems to me quite obvious that if you hate objectification and alienation, you need to work against capitalism, first and foremost. With that gone, what you hate most about prostitution also dissappears. With it in place, all the laws in the world won’t do much good because – guess what – the State under capitslism actually helps GENERATE the kind of dispair that leads to enslavement.

      As for radfems, I know quite a few and have probably been dealing with them since before you were born.

      Here’s something you can do to show me you’re not just farting out your pie-hole, as so many of your cafep-crawling, hipster radfem crowd does: show me ONE radfem initiative to crim inalize marriage and husbands.

      Just one, Ploddie.

      Because every single argument you level against prostitution can be leveled against marriage, twice over.

      And yet we don’t see ANY radfem initiatives along these lines, do we?

      And why is that?

      I suspect it is because you lot know damned well that you have no support whatsoever for such a manuever. You DO, however, have the support of the Christian right for your little war on prostitutes, however, so THAT’S what you’re going to concentrate on.

      You’re a real proud, fearsome and courageous lot, aren’t you? Just stick to your theoretical guns, come thick or thin, don’t you?

      Bunch of sad, confused and sexually repressed cafe crawlers is all you lot are. Wanna-be doms who use prostitu

      Reply
      1. Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette

        …who use prostitutes’ collective bodies to get your rocks off.

        And you don’t even have the common decency to ask for their consent or pay them first.

        That’s what sickens me about you so-called radfems: you play your “issues” regarding sex out in public, using prostitutes as the target for your frustrations and inverted self-haterd. You applaud the police abuse of prostitutes, as long as they use the proper language in the Guardian to describe it. And then you ahve the gall to whine about bad johns.

        You’re just a sick little lot of friustrated BSDM consumers, too cowardly to act on your desires yourself, so you push for the cops and the state to be your proxy in the violation of other men and women.

        Please, bull me no shit about your “commitements” to any sort of struggle.

        Regarding children, you are an ignorant ass if you think a 17 year old and n 8 year old are the same thing, legally, economically, socially, or sexually. They aremanifestly not. I happen to agree with Brazilian law. It gives 15+ people sexual autonomy for anything BUT prostitution. I don’t think minors should be working in sex work for the same reason they shouldn’t be working ANYWHERE. But if you are seriously arguing that sex is some horrible, traumatic event for someone who’s 17 years and 363 days old, but perfectly OK for someone who is 18 years old – which seems to be your argument- then you are a fool and a jackass.

        But, actually, I think it’s probably more liklely that you don’t think sex is a good thing for anyone, anywhere.

        As for your arguments about the welfare state, it’s being dismantled everywhere and doesn’t even exist in most of thew world. If you think it’s somehow a great barrier top prostitution, think again.

        Maybe you should spend less time worrying about whjat people do with their peepees and more time actiually struggling against capitalism, Ploddie? Just a thought.

        Reply
  25. nada

    Again- the point with rad fem is to argue about sex rather than making safe conditions for workers. – Completely ignoring the peer based sex work organization and the realities that the workers face. They continue to PUSH dangerous laws knowingly – because of their ideological view that paid for sex is rape.

    They can’t – even for a second, drop their ideological view to actually support other women to make life safer and better for themselves. Instead, they’d rather forcefully and violently make women submit to their ideology using police force.

    I call these types- scum of the earth.

    Reply
  26. Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette

    And excellent little study about the effects of the Swedish model and how it´s being used to marginalize and even criminalize prostitutes: http:// cybersolidaires.typepad.com/files/jaylevy-impacts-of-swedish-criminalisation-on-sexworkers.pdf

    The article is quite chilling as it points out what happens when radfems take power: total disempowerment and marginalization of sex workers. Patholiziation and stigmatization of an already vulnerable population. The abuse of police power to selectively target groups of sex workers deemed “undesireable”, particularly migrants.

    Here’s the conclusion:

    So to sum up, it seems that where laws have been introduced as part of an effort to create a sex work free Sweden, there has not been evidence demonstrating that levels have declined. In spite of the fact that sex work cannot be said to have decreased, laws are advocated as successes to be exported to other states.

    “the one purpose of the law that the government has fulfilled… from the beginning (the intention) that the law should be exported to other countries… irrespective of the fact that the knowledge base was so poor, I mean the empirical (evidence) was very poor, very weak”
    (Interview, 2010, Senior Advisor Regarding Prostitution – National Board of Health and Welfare)

    Measurable outcomes of laws seem disruptive, with discourses feeding detrimentally into service provision and authoritative attention, and discourse and legislation in Sweden serving to further pathologise and stigmatise already vulnerable groups. Inclusion of such marginalised groups in evaluation and political process seems to be of great importance, at a time when the very groups legislation pertains to continue to be excluded and invisiblised from debate.

    “There’s never been nobody who asked the sellers about what they think… But we don’t in Sweden. We assume. Talk to the people who sell sex. Talk to them. Cause it doesn’t happen in Sweden”
    (Interview, 2010, Social Worker, Malmö Prostitution Unit KAST)

    Reply
  27. Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette

    People use sex instrumentally and always have. Prostitution is about the instrumental use of sex. People have a RIGHT to do what they wish with their bodies and that includes having sex for pay.

    Radical feminists say that unless one wants to have sex, wholly and fully, sex is rape. I say that rape is when one DOESN’T want to have sex and is forced to. There’s a huge middle ground between “enthusiastic consent” and “rape” where 99.9% of really occurring sex happens and prostitution slots into this middle ground.

    This is why it strikes me that people like Auntie Plodon are almost certainly anti-sexual. When there definition of “rape” is so broad as to criminalize the vast majority of sex occurring between human biengs, then it’s quite reasonable to draw the conclusion that they themselves have problems with sex.

    This problem is over-idealization of sex. The belief that it needs must be some sort of sublime, soul-moving activity and that if it is not, there’s something wrong.

    Unfortunately, sex is like anything else in the world: a small part of it is good, a lot more is “eh” and a small part is bad.

    I do not see how we are going to make a better and more just world by tossing the “eh” sex in with the bad.

    Yesterday I was down at Buenos Aires 85, a fast foda in downtown Rio, taking interviews again. I was struck by how clear the prostitutes I was interviewing are regarding what is sex, what is business and what is rape. They do not consider what bthey do to be rape, although most of them also don’t like it. They are very clear on that point.

    I’m always amazed that radical feminists feel that they can speak FOR prostitutes and rarely bother to actually listen to them. Their discourse is profoundly colonizing. Instead of presuming that prostitute women could tell them what they want and need, radical feminists presume that they already know.

    What did the women tell me yesterday that they disliked most about prostitution? Having to have sex with strange men. What did they like the most about it? The money, which was seen as being much better than any other work they could get.

    What were their demands? Not an end to sex work, even though they didn’t like it: they wanted job training programs, decent schools and decent working conditions in the brothels themselves.

    Not a single prostitute I have ever met here in Rio has ever said “Please arrest me and stick me in ‘re-education’. When I get out, help me find a minimum wage job where I kae 1/3rd to 1/10th what I did selling sex. This is what I really need in life, along with a criminal record.”

    It is absolutely appalling to me that anyone who claims to have concern for these women could believe that criminalization – of them or of clients – can actually help them.

    Reply
  28. Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette

    Oh, and by the way, regarding the “fight the demand” rhetoric…

    Do you seriously think that that has worked so well in the context of the War on Drugs over the last 40 years that we need to export the same methodology to sex work now?

    Has fighting demand eliminated or even reduced drug use ANYWHERE?

    Because DECRIMINALIZATION certainly has.

    Reply
  29. antiplondon

    Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette,

    “No one here is agreeing that anyone should be having sex without consent.

    You, on the other hand, are arguing that the State needs must criminalize some forms of consensual sex between adults.

    I reiterate: if two adults want to have sex, that is not only their choice, it is their RIGHT.”

    Do you champion men’s right to ‘choose’ to work in a factory with unsafe machinery they know will cripple them?

    If you are defending prostitution as ‘work’ then it is ‘work’ that cannot be made safe in any meaningful way. There is a physiological and psychological reality to submitting to unwanted sex, sex industry advocates re-label this harm as ‘work’.

    If you are defending prostitution as ‘sex’ then you are saying that all sex is good, even coerced sex.

    “First, it comes from the Swedish government stats themselves. You can look them up and see how successful they’ve been in prosecuting sex work consumers: not very.”

    The aim of the Swedish government wasn’t specifically to arrest lots of men, it was to reduce prostitution and change social attitudes to men buying sex. When Sweden criminalised using physical violence against children, their aim wasn’t to criminalise and arrest lots of parents, it was to change people’s attitudes to violence against children, and reduce levels of violence against children; laws have a normative value.

    “Finally, they come from Brazilian prostitutes who’ve been to Sweden and been arrested in the course of the implementation of the Nordic model.”

    Immigration, while it overlaps with prostitution considerably, is not the same thing as prostitution; even New Zealand hasn’t dropped all border controls to allow free movement of prostitutes into the country.

    “This last point reveals your contempt for prostitutes, by the way. You QUOTE me talking about it and then dismiss that information as irrelevant because “it doesn’t come from the Swedish goverment”.”

    I said it didn’t come from Sweden, not that it didn’t come from the Swedish government, you are doing your ‘research’ in Brazil, and you were talking about Sweden as if you were personally there yourself.

    “Here in Brazil, we had the cops raid a trans lodging house to “save” three minor trans. […]”

    That is obviously an appalling example of police abuse and incompetence, but it has nothing to do with the Nordic Model (unless there was prostitution happening out of that lodging house, and you just left that point out?), and there is no way the Nordic Model would automatically lead to such a situation.

    “As for your experience with battered women, I have a pretty good idea that it is little to nil. Only someone who has zero practical experience with battered women could make some of the claims you’re making.”

    You don’t know anything. I know lots of women, all of them feminists of some description, they are not all white, or middle class, or straight, some are single mothers, some are disabled, some are balancing paid work with caring for a disabled relative, some have well-paid careers, others are unemployed, some have been victims of domestic violence, some staff battered women’s shelters and rape crisis centers, a few are even exited prostitutes, so you have no right, proof or justification to say that I don’t know any thing about domestic violence, or anything else.

    I know it suits your empty rhetoric to pretend that all radical feminists are privileged women who sit around all day drinking coffee (and what is this tedious, repetitive obsession with coffee? is nobody allowed a nice cup of tea?), but it simply is not true.

    “Either start discoursing civilly and logically or shut the fuck up and expect to receive what you dish out.”

    Oh that is funny; you talk about my anus being violently penetrated, talk about ramming things down my “snaggle-toothed pie hole”, call me a pervert and a psychopath and a sadist, but I’m the one not discoursing civilly?

    “Auntie Ploddie, maybe you should have more sex in a committed relationship and out of it before you go philosophizing about what it should and shouldn’t be? Because given what you seem to think about it, as expressed here, it’s pretty hard to escape the conclusion that you haven’t actually fucked much in your life, if at all.”

    Yeah, because all any woman needs is a good deep dicking to shut her up and get her in line right?

    “And, by the way, according to the many johns I’ve interviewed, prostitutes can be far more enthusiastic than many other bedmates, at least by any measureable, objective standard.”

    So because prostitutes put on the performance the johns expect from them, because they need to in order to survive financially, that means everything is fine? You claim you listen to women, but report what men say about women as the most relevant information.

    “Here’s something you can do to show me you’re not just farting out your pie-hole, as so many of your cafep-crawling, hipster radfem crowd does: show me ONE radfem initiative to crim inalize marriage and husbands.”

    If you think ‘radical feminist’ is synonymous with ‘hipster’, not only do you not understand what radical feminist means, you don’t know what hipster means either – but what else can one expect from someone who thinks that Christian fundamentalists are championing gay marriage?

    Radical feminists have a defined set of political beliefs, it doesn’t just mean any woman you disagree with. Hipsters tend to be into pornography and prostitution, because they’re into being ‘edgy’ and ‘transgressive’ and ironic, and are very much invested in those magical choosy-choices.

    Your demand is asinine, you may as well demand that I try to criminalise pregnancy, since the institution of motherhood under patriarchy oppresses women.

    “Regarding children, you are an ignorant ass if you think a 17 year old and n 8 year old are the same thing, legally, economically, socially, or sexually. They aremanifestly not. I happen to agree with Brazilian law. It gives 15+ people sexual autonomy for anything BUT prostitution. I don’t think minors should be working in sex work for the same reason they shouldn’t be working ANYWHERE. But if you are seriously arguing that sex is some horrible, traumatic event for someone who’s 17 years and 363 days old, but perfectly OK for someone who is 18 years old – which seems to be your argument- then you are a fool and a jackass.”

    You don’t think eight-year-olds should be sexually acted upon? well done you, go collect your cookie!

    The thing is, you keep saying Agustin isn’t in favour of child prostitution, but nowhere does she say what she thinks the lower age limit should be, for sexual activity or prostitution. She just falls back on ‘cultural norms’, in some parts of the world it’s normal for eight-year-old girls to be sold off in marriage to men decades older than them.

    Any age of consent is going to be arbitrary to a certain degree; whatever it is set at there are going to be teenagers younger who are mature enough for sexual relationships, and older teenagers who are not. I am not against teenage sexuality, despite what you might like to think, I am against sexual exploitation – the change over from under the age of consent to over the age of consent doesn’t suddenly change prostitution from abuse to ’empowering choice’.

    You’re being obfuscatory here yourself, by saying 15-year-olds shouldn’t be in prostitution only because 15-year-olds shouldn’t be in work at all, as if prostitution were no different to a weekend job in a supermarket.

    “As for your arguments about the welfare state, it’s being dismantled everywhere and doesn’t even exist in most of thew world. If you think it’s somehow a great barrier top prostitution, think again.”

    That doesn’t address any of the points I was making. You were claiming that the Nordic Model directly caused the institutional abuse of homeless thirteen-year-olds, you haven’t offered anything to support that assertion.

    “Radical feminists say that unless one wants to have sex, wholly and fully, sex is rape. I say that rape is when one DOESN’T want to have sex and is forced to. There’s a huge middle ground between “enthusiastic consent” and “rape” where 99.9% of really occurring sex happens and prostitution slots into this middle ground.”

    You admit that women in prostitution don’t like or enjoy the sex involved in prostitution, and only do it for the money (contradicting, by the way, the reports by johns of ‘enthusiasm’ you cite above), how is that need for money not a form of coercion? Describing anything that doesn’t fall into the categories of ‘violent dragged-in-to-a-dark-alley rape’ and ‘enthusiastic consent’ as merely “eh” ignores that there is a psychological reality to sex, you reduce women (and men) to biological automatons, where sex is no different to any menial physical activity.

    Saying that less than 0.1% of sex is actually genuinely enjoyable for women is very revealing, so thank you for being so honest about how oppressive things actually are for women. You are admitting that you think if women were genuinely socially and economically free, most of them wouldn’t be having sex with men at all – I’m actually more genuinely ‘positive’ about sex than you are, as I think heterosexual sex would still happen frequently under genuine freedom and equality.

    “This problem is over-idealization of sex. The belief that it needs must be some sort of sublime, soul-moving activity and that if it is not, there’s something wrong.”

    I have never said that. I don’t think sex should be ‘sublime’ or ‘soul-moving’, I just think it shouldn’t be psychologically damaging.

    “I’m always amazed that radical feminists feel that they can speak FOR prostitutes and rarely bother to actually listen to them.”

    I have never claimed to speak FOR prostitutes. You claim to listen to prostitutes, but then call sex industry survivors liars in the pay of radical feminists when what they say doesn’t follow your party line.

    “Not a single prostitute I have ever met here in Rio has ever said “Please arrest me and stick me in ‘re-education’. When I get out, help me find a minimum wage job where I kae 1/3rd to 1/10th what I did selling sex. This is what I really need in life, along with a criminal record.”

    The abolitionist model does not involve criminalising prostitutes, it does not involve locking them up or ‘re-educating’ them. It does involve removing past criminal convictions connected with prostitution from their records.

    “Do you seriously think that that has worked so well in the context of the War on Drugs over the last 40 years that we need to export the same methodology to sex work now?”

    I don’t think there is any useful comparison between the two, one is the trade in chemical substances, the other is the trade in human beings. How about the illegal arms trade? If we decriminalised the trade in arms to oppressive regimes, that would end the criminal activity around the trade in arms to oppressive regimes.

    I think some drugs should be licensed and sold the same way alcohol and tobacco is, and that all users themselves should be decriminalsied and treated by the medical system, and a clean supply given to addicts.

    Prostitution is different, because it is the trade in human beings, and without challenging demand (changing people’s attitudes as well as changing the law) the demand will still be there even when there is no woman desperate enough to do it with out a gun to her head.

    Reply
    1. Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette

      Dear Auntie Ploddie,

      You ask if I champion men’s right to ‘choose’ to work in a factory with unsafe machinery they know will cripple them. My answer would be that in such a situation, I would support the men and help them organize for better working conditions. If their only options are starving or working in that factory, prohibiting them from working isn’t an option.

      This is, in fact, what has brought a modicum of civilization to the workplace: WORKERS’ ORGANIZATION. The workewrs organize for better conditions and we support them, forcing the state to prohibit bad working conditions and keeping the state to that.

      If you were to apply your beliefs regarding sex work to the workplace, you would ban all labor because some factories force their workers to use dangerous machines which can kill or cripple them.

      No, I would not force anyone to work in inhuman conditions. I would SUPPORT them in changing those conditions. You, on the other hand, would send the police into those dangerous factories TO ARREST THE WORKERS.

      That’s the problem with your views, Ploddie: you don’t support the women in those dangerous conditions by arresting, jailing and deporting them. And yet that’s ewxactly what you’d have us do.

      It becomes ridiculous when you apply the same measures to the industrial workplace, doesn’t it? I submit to you that the only reason it isn’t EQUALLY ridiculous to you in the context of sex work is that you have an irrational aversion to sex workers which allows you to dehumanize and abjectify them.

      You are, in short, pornophobic. And your pornophobia makes you believe that arresting and jailing workers is the best way to improve work conditions.

      By the way, if you can’t read for content, then quit while you’re ahead. The information I posted regarding the Swedish Model DOES INDEED come from Sweden. Direct from the mouths of the Swedish anti-trafficking ambassador, the chief of police of Gothemburg and Brazilian immigrants who’ve been caught up in their new laws.

      Your info, on the other hand, seems to come second hand from sources like The Guardian.

      To reiterate: the Swedish model doesn’t reduce prostitution and it can’t even criminalize clients unless a prostitute agrees to turn State’s evidence. What it DOES do is allow the Swedish State a politically correct rationale to go after immigrant prostitutes.

      That is all.

      As for “civil discourse”, you started with the insults, sweetie. You have flat-out called Laura an appologist for pedophilia when it’s quite clear she’s nothing of the sort. You’ve called me a john while claiming that all johns are criminals. You’re doing all this anonymously, by the way, whereas everyone else posting here has the common courtesy and courage to post under their given name.

      As for your little fantasies about having your anus violated, again, it seems to me that for someone who spends so much time hating porn, you sure do obsess over it.

      With regards to kids and work, no, I really don’t think there’s all that much NECESSARY difference between forms of work, having heard far too many tales from 15 and 16 year old girls who HAVE worked as maids and checkout counter girls and who were subjected to honest-to-god sexual abuse in those jobs. I do not think minors should be working, period, outside of some culturally specific conditions because of the potential for power abuse that, inevitably, ends up creating sexual abuse.

      “You were claiming that the Nordic Model directly caused the institutional abuse of homeless thirteen-year-olds, you haven’t offered anything to support that assertion.”

      Sorry, Auntie Ploddy, I never claimed that. Time to up your meds: you’re halucinating.

      What I HAVE claimed is that the arrest and imprisonment of minors in the U.S. is DIRECTLY tied to their sexual abuse. Some 30% of minors in prison or jail in the states are sexually abused. That ups to about 80% in the case of GLBT youth. So what you’re proposing – the criminalization of underaged sex workers instead of the criminalization of underaged sexual exploitation – is not a viable way to protect kids.

      My point is that if the Swedish model is going to be applied ANYWHERE it should be applied to underaged sex workers.

      You, on the other hand, want to see these kids criminalized.

      And with regards to consent and sex, people can consent to having sex that’s not enthusiastic. This is not the same thing as rape, by a long shot. People use sex for a number of reasons and what needs to be foregrounded is CONSENT, not “pleasure” or “enthusiasm” or any other subjective, unmeasureable quality.

      I brough up the fact that most johns report sex workers as highly enthusiastic PRECISELY to show you how stupid “enthusiasm” is as a metric, fool. How does one measure “enthusiasm”?

      What’s really sick about all this, Ploddie, si that you are the one who’s not taking rape seriously. You want to define as “rape” all sex which is not persoanlly acceptable to YOU. You want to remove lack of consent as the defining feature of rape. You want to give the State the power to decide for women what they should and should not do with their bodies.

      And then you have the gall to whine about “patriarchy”, as if the State wasn’t the most consolidated form of patriarchy that has ever existed. Why you think making all sex but the most rarified and mutually satisfying illegal will somehow magically result in a more just world, given the LONG history of the State’s use of laws regarding sex to repress women is simply beyond me.

      When it comes right down to it, Ploddie, I don’t think you’re very bright or well-informed if you think state criminalization of 95% of existing sex is a good way to protect women.

      I think you’re a perfect fool, in fact, and a hypocrite to boot.

      Actually, I think less than 0.1% of sex is enjoyable for MEN OR WOMEN in the rarified, mutually fulfilling sense you’re describing. In fact, I very much doubt that you have ever had any sexual experience yourself, given the way you seem to completely idealize the sex act. And don’t give me this bullshit about how you think sex shouldn’t be “damaging” when you define anything else other than full-on mutual sexual satisfaction backed by enthusiasm as somehow “damaging”.

      Speaking as someone who has had a lot of unsatisfying, unenthusiastic sex, you are talking straight out your ass if you think that this is anything like rape.

      Most people – MEN AND WOMEN – have sex for a variety of reasons that has nothing to do with mutual fulfillment and men are actually probably WORSE when it comes to feeling and understanding sexual pleasure than women. If you knew anything about male sexual anatomy or even bothered to study the first thing about male sexual psychology, your view that sex is some endless rape party would quickly deflate.

      Y’know, I have yet to see a “sex industry survivor” speak who wasn’t getting paid – in money, status , or other bennies. I’m sure such folks exist, but they’re pretty rare on the ground. By contrast, I know hundreds and hundreds of sex workers who may or may not like their jobs, but certainly would contest your view of them as voiceless victims who’d be better off washing your panties for a minimum wage.

      So forgive me if I don’t hold much stock with radfem chataquas which base their arguments on one individual’s horror stories. In fact, I find it rather amusing that radfems pay sex workers in this manner, as if sex workers don’t understadn full-on what a client wants and how to cater to their particular fantasies.

      As for abolitionism not criminalizing prostitutes, you’re simply wrong: it does. It makes any social relationship with a prostitute a criminal act, including renting them rooms, taking money from them, etc. I talked to a prositute this last week who spent two years in jail in France for subletting a room – at market rates – to her friend who was also a prostitute. If you were to actuially talk to these women instead of getting your information from newspapers, ypou’d quickly discover how easy it is to arrewst and harass prostitutes using abolitionist laws, just like the Swedes are doing.

      You are flat-out fantasizing if you think abolitionist laws don’t end up arresting, stigmatizing and criminalizing prostitutes.

      Reply
  30. Pingback: Academic grooming | Anti-Porn Feminists

  31. nada

    antiplo- you are the only person here that is negating sex worker’s voices by claiming ONLY the victim stories are to be heard- silencing ALL OTHER VOICES of sex workers. You decide for EVERYONE ELSE that sex work is DAMAGING – again silencing ALL SEX WORKERS who are telling you that it is NOT.

    When the people who these laws are affected by are telling you that criminalizing clients LEADS TO VIOLENT POLICE ACTION – only YOU are ignoring it in only supporting the voice of trafficked victims.

    I am sorry that sex is so terrible that you’d partake in it only with a gun to your head. Other women enjoy sex and see no issue in having sex with strangers- paid or unpaid and do not feel “owned” by anyone in that interaction.

    It is terrible that you don’t care about other women unless they are “victims” for you.

    Reply
  32. antiplondon

    Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette,

    “This problem is over-idealization of sex. The belief that it needs must be some sort of sublime, soul-moving activity and that if it is not, there’s something wrong.”

    The quality of the sex has nothing to do with the quality of consent, because the consent comes first (this should be obvious); what matters to me is that the ‘yes’ is meaningful, a ‘yes’ that is manipulated, nagged, bribed, threatened or otherwise coerced is not a meaningful ‘yes’ and not meaningful consent.

    “That’s the problem with your views, Ploddie: you don’t support the women in those dangerous conditions by arresting, jailing and deporting them. And yet that’s ewxactly what you’d have us do.”

    No, I do not support the arrest or jailing of prostitutes, and the state can’t deport someone who is a citizen of that country. ‘Sex work’ can’t be made safe because it’s the only ‘work’ where the abuse is the work itself, rather than an avoidable by-product of work.

    “As for “civil discourse”, you started with the insults, sweetie. You have flat-out called Laura an appologist for pedophilia when it’s quite clear she’s nothing of the sort. You’ve called me a john while claiming that all johns are criminals. You’re doing all this anonymously, by the way, whereas everyone else posting here has the common courtesy and courage to post under their given name.”

    Agustin is an apologist for paedophilia, her writing goes way beyond harm-reduction or criticism of ‘rescue’ programmes; she says that prostitution is work that children want to do, and stopping them doing it oppresses them and makes them unhappy, and she defends child prostitution as part of a child’s sexuality. She has refused to state a lower limit on how old she thinks is ok for a child to be sexually active.

    In your second comment on this blog post you said you had spent a decade visiting brothels in Brazil, it was not unreasonable of me to assume you were a john, as johns love pontificating on how much women love being prostitutes.

    Nothing I have said compares to the level of name-calling and abusive, violent language you have been using against me.

    There have been 15 individuals (not including Agustin herself) leaving comments on this blog post, only four of them have used a full name, that’s hardly ‘everyone else’.

    “As for your little fantasies about having your anus violated, again, it seems to me that for someone who spends so much time hating porn, you sure do obsess over it.”

    I see, so you can say any abusive thing you like, but if I dare to complain, you just ridicule me; you do all that then have the gall to try to claim the moral high ground on ‘civil behavior’.

    ““You were claiming that the Nordic Model directly caused the institutional abuse of homeless thirteen-year-olds, you haven’t offered anything to support that assertion.”

    Sorry, Auntie Ploddy, I never claimed that. Time to up your meds: you’re halucinating.”

    On the 31st March you wrote:

    “Now let’s take your perrenial example of a 13 year old forced into prostitution.

    “How do the police being allowed to arrest, stigmatize and institutionalize her help her situation? Why isn’t it enough that the police arrest and imprison her kidnappers and the men haveing sex with her?

    “This is the point you keep dodging, Ploddie.

    “So can we take it that you are fine with placing chilcren in institutions that routinely end up sexually assaulting them? Can we take it that you are fine, ultimately, with the rape and battery of thirteen year old girls as long as it happens in a duly approved social institution, such as a police station or halfway home?”

    You wrote this in response to my support of the Nordic Model, it is a criticism of the Nordic Model, it is claiming that the Nordic Model will cause these things.

    I asked how the Nordic Model would directly cause such things to happen if the abusive institutions that allow them to happen did not already exist in the first place.

    “My point is that if the Swedish model is going to be applied ANYWHERE it should be applied to underaged sex workers.

    “You, on the other hand, want to see these kids criminalized.”

    Hang on, how does this work? You say the Nordic Model should be applied to children, I support the Nordic Model, but you say that means I want child prostitutes to be criminalised?

    “And with regards to consent and sex, people can consent to having sex that’s not enthusiastic. This is not the same thing as rape, by a long shot. People use sex for a number of reasons and what needs to be foregrounded is CONSENT, not “pleasure” or “enthusiasm” or any other subjective, unmeasureable quality.”

    As I have already said, the quality of the sex bears no relation to the quality of consent. Submitting to unwanted sex is psychologically harmful, mediocre sex is just that, mediocre – I never claimed that all sex should be ‘perfect’, that was you putting words into my mouth.

    One may not be able to measure how ‘enthusiastic’ sexual activity itself is, but it is fairly easy to tell if a ‘yes’ is freely given or not; the ‘enthusiasm’ I talked about was for saying yes to sex, as in, the person saying yes said it without being threatened or bribed or nagged for hours first.

    “Speaking as someone who has had a lot of unsatisfying, unenthusiastic sex, you are talking straight out your ass if you think that this is anything like rape.”

    That is not what I am saying, and if you think that even men only enjoy 0.01% of the sex they have, then I feel genuinely sorry for you.

    “Y’know, I have yet to see a “sex industry survivor” speak who wasn’t getting paid – in money, status , or other bennies. I’m sure such folks exist, but they’re pretty rare on the ground.”

    Well thank you for making your hatred and contempt for sex industry survivors so clear and obvious, it’s something useful to point to whenever someone asks why more survivors don’t speak out publically about their experiences.

    Nada,

    “antiplo- you are the only person here that is negating sex worker’s voices by claiming ONLY the victim stories are to be heard- silencing ALL OTHER VOICES of sex workers.”

    Where have I said only survivors’ stories should be heard? Where have I called any ‘sex worker’ a liar (and no, calling out Brooke Magnanti on my blog for her bad behavior doesn’t count)? How do I have the power to censor anyone?

    “I am sorry that sex is so terrible that you’d partake in it only with a gun to your head.”

    Where have I said I would only have sex with a gun to my head?

    Reply
  33. nada

    Maybe you should read your prior writer’s posts before posting. Antiplo. It makes you look more psycho than you already are.

    Reply
  34. Thaddeus Blanchette

    I think the most important error people like Ploddie make is the following: they presume that the state security forces will follow their radfem agenda when it comes to employing prostitution laws.

    Obviously, the cops aren’t and will never be radfems. This is so obvious that one wonders why it needs to be said. And yet radfems apparently can’t be pissed to actually employ their own ideology when it comes to looking at the state – which they charge to be patriarchical, racist and capitalist.

    Well if the state is all those things (and it manifestly is), then WHY will it follow the radfem agenda when it applies anti-prostitution laws?

    What it will do – has provably done in Sweden and elsewhere, repeatedly, throughout history – is take those laws and effectively impose a de facto regulamentationism, but one which is not bound by the law, but by cops’ whims.

    So a sex worker who is raped by a client in Sweden or Scotland will likely be told that what she did was illegal – prostitution – and to shut up and go home, in spite of the law’s supposed orientation to protecting women.

    This is what I find to be the most ludicrous point of Ploddies’ position and that of other radfems: they don’t look at what cops actually DO with these laws they want to enact. This is a particularly grevious error for people who claim to understand that the state is a tool of the patriarchy.

    This is why radfems like Ploddie are neither radical nor feminist in my book. They are not radical, but actually liberals of the worst sort. They believe that the state is an appropriate agent of reform in what is (presumably) a pluralist and balanced society. The State use anti-client laws to preferentially bust and deport foreign women? NEVER! The State wouldn’t do that because the law is supposed to be only used for good!!!! [roll eyes]

    And feminists? They are essentially destroying the concept of consent when it comes to sex and women’s bodies. They are enabling the State to be the agency to determine what is good and bad sex for women and to employ power and policing based on this model. In short, they are actually REINFORCING the structures of patriarchy by empowering them.

    Radfems, my ass. Liberal, middleclass, white kids with daddy issues is more like it.

    Reply
    1. Laura Agustín

      It’s usually slid over, this point about turning to the state for redress on issues the state precisely has such a bad record on (women and sex in general). We’re always hearing about the ‘strange alliance’ between some feminists and some christian evangelicals, as though it were contradictory, but I’ve never myself had difficulty understanding. Strategic alliances are conventional, and lots of groups have agendas about sexual behaviour. But turning to the state as your big ally – even if states have improved a little and those who run them are more diverse nowadays – is like turning to big Daddy to fix things. He hit me! She stole my toy! Fix it for me! Not that there shouldn’t be laws we strive to improve, but that a *central* part of any social-justice programme should rely on police seems very old-fashioned and authoritarian.

      Reply
  35. Pingback: Laura Agustin is now censoring my comments | Anti-Porn Feminists

  36. Pingback: Looks like I may have hit a nerve with Agustin after all! | Anti-Porn Feminists

  37. Pingback: Slavery Today | Youth on the street, selling sex and End Demand ht…

  38. Pingback: Negazioniste della tratta e attori porno smemorati | Massimo Lizzi

  39. Pingback: Are Meaningful Sexual Choices For Everybody, Or Just The Privileged Few? | Autonomous Radical Feminists

  40. Pingback: 2. Négation des violences dans la prostitution | Qu'est ce que le STRASS ?

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.