Category Archives: feminisms

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

I am not Michael O’Leary, and other meditations on public performance

Photo of Laura Agustín by Workers Solidarity Movement (Ireland)

Doing public gigs exposes one to all sorts of comment, some nice and some not so nice. At University College Dublin I sketched out the ideas in Sex at the Margins – a book that began in the early 90s with me listening to Dominican villagers, ten years later became a doctorate on the Rescue Industry and three years after a published book. At the Anarchist Bookfair I talked about Sex Work as Work (a video of the talk will be online soon).

This talk was only 30 minutes long so I had warned I didn’t intend to get bogged down in arguments about the meaning of prostitution. Nevertheless, the first person called on after my talk began to lay out an argument that prostitution is oppression of women and so on, so after not long I interrupted her from the stage to ask Do you have a question? No, she said, she wanted to debate. I said, This time is for questions about my talk. She quickly framed one, which was

Will you condemn the sex industry as patriarchy?

I said no, because that question is too broad and general to have meaning for me. It’s a bottom-line question, and by saying no without explaining all the ins and outs of my thinking I will have sounded like an anti-feminist to some. But if I travel so far to speak without pay I really do want to hear audience reaction to what I do say, not to what I don’t say.

All other questions asked were interesting, but at the end there was

How can we move toward a society in which sex is not commodified?

Photo by Workers Solidarity Movement (Ireland)

Anarchism takes in a wide variety of ways of thinking. I accept that talking about revolution and how things would be afterwards is really interesting and important to many, but my talk had been about feet-on-the-ground ways to better the lives of people who sell sex through employment policy and organising. So I replied

I don’t know. Everything else is commodified, why should sex be different?

This provoked a tweeter to say

Michael O’Leary, the million or billionaire owner of Ryanair, is widely hated in Ireland. I can’t find a single significant thing he and I have in common. When I have more time to talk about commodification I discuss the odd point that even mother love is accepted by most of the same objectors as being ok to buy and sell in the form of nannying and caring for children and older and sick people. The same tweeter said

Although an interest in revolution and utopia are only one of many possible topics subsumed by feminism or anarchism or any other ism, those wanting to discuss them always assume the moral high ground. Practical, pragmatic arguments about the here and now would seem to occupy a lower place in the hierarchy according to some. But not according to me, and I also dislike being challenged to show I am a good or righteous person publicly, merely as an exercise to label me – really to show I’ve failed some ethical test.

People ask me how I deal with being disliked or vilified. I accept that appearing in public exposes me, and I don’t always express myself perfectly. I don’t read prepared papers and I avoid standing behind protective podiums. I’m not a trained performer. But beyond those reasons, in order to talk about the formal-informal sector divide in government accounting and how it affects employment policy, the ILO’s conclusions in its report The Sex Sector and what the term ‘sex industry’ comprises, in 30 minutes, one has to omit the disclaimers. I could begin every point by condemning inequality, sexism, racism, imperialism, the oppression of women and poor people, but then I would lose a big chunk of the time I’ve got for the talk, and I’m not willing to do that. So I regret when I am misinterpreted badly, but I accept that it comes with the territory.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Coda

Sex on Sunday: Beware of the Anarchist Bookfair & its devilish talk on sex work

The Anarchist Bookfair is next Saturday 6 April, and I am looking forward to talking specifically about ideas related to sex work as a job or occupation or livelihood or profession – without giving centre-stage to feminist arguments, or any other -isms for that matter. That does not mean I think feminisms are irrelevant, but the focus on them has impeded dealing with labour policy on commercial sex for donkey’s years. All my ideas are infused with concepts of social justice whether they come from anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anarchist, socialist or feminist traditions. I’ve been a second-wave and third-wave feminist in my own way and plan to belong to future waves, as well – but consider arguing about which specific ideas are ideologically correct a waste of my time.

At University College Dublin on the 4th I’ll talk about Sex at the Margins, the full monty.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Talking about sex work without isms: Dublin Anarchist Bookfair

As everyone knows, I don’t play around with isms. I thought in the 60s that feminism might work but by the early 70s had already realised there were multiple versions – feminisms – which perhaps negates the whole point of an ism, which is a doctrine, theory or philosophy that Explains Things. It turned out that feminism(s), while useful and fascinating, could not provide a whole thought-system to explain how all women feel – or What Women Want, as Freud complained.

I didn’t even think about feminism and prostitution as a ‘problem’ until decades later, when I went back to school. And after reading dozens of books and hundreds of articles and essays on the subject, I realised that this ‘problem’ would never be solved. Many people find it endlessly interesting to hammer at each other about the meaning of prostitution and/or sex work, with the goal of winning, but I don’t. So I began trying to avoid talking about feminisms just to keep things interesting for me, but it is very hard, as some kind of tidal force relentlessly pulls conversations back to that argument. None of which means I don’t think of myself as a feminist – I obviously am one.

I did write Sex as Work and Sex Work in a marxian way for The Commoner, whose editors requested I depart from a post-argument position – as though we’d already accepted that sex can be work, paid or unpaid. It’s been republished several times, by Jacobin and libcom.org, which both can encompass both marxist and anarchist ideas, at least sometimes (and also by Arts & Opinion). I used the term marxian rather than marxist for my own contribution precisely because it doesn’t address all the key factors in marxism.  There’s no such thing as marxianism.

Now, I’m doing two talks in Dublin a few days apart in April. At the first, at University College Dublin I’ll take an hour and describe how migration, trafficking, sex work and the Rescue Industry are related. This is the time needed to join these ideas up so that people aren’t confused and frustrated when I stop talking. Then we’ll have a half hour for questions – not for statements of protest and ideology. Then we’ll have respondents – abolitionists and sex workers among them.

At the Anarchist Bookfair I’ve got 30 minutes to talk, followed by 30 minutes of discussion, so I won’t be talking about all that. I was asked to talk about Feminism and Sex Work, so I’m going to talk about how feminism(s) are interesting but perhaps not essential to a discussion of sex work, or at least don’t have to be granted determining status of outcomes. I’ll expect questions afterwards not  to try to pull the topic back to the classic, closed-circle debate. I know – Good luck with that. I also won’t be modelling a perfectly coherent view according to marxism, anarchism or any other ism. Ha! someone on the facebook page for the Bookfair has accused me of liberalism, after reading approximately 25 words of my work.

All I ask for is a moderator – and if there isn’t one, I’ll get tough.

6 April 2013, 1220-1320

Thinking about Sex Work as Work with Laura Agustín

at the 8th Anarchist Dublin Bookfair

Doors open at 10am and first meetings start at 1130. The venue is Liberty Hall, Eden Quay, next to the River Liffey, shown here on a map. Enter on the ground floor and go up one flight for the talk. The bookfair itself – the books – are underground!

Other events in the Bookfair include an evening in The Pint pub, Eden Quay, on Saturday and a walking tour on Sunday at 1400 focussing on the Irish Banking industry (catalysers of economic collapse). These events are organised by Workers Solidarity Movement (Ireland).

For those who cannot conceive of a sex-work conversation without nattering endlessly about feminisms, try Sex as Work and Sex Work. It can be done.

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Satanic Sex on Sunday: Gunilla Ekberg, Sex War and Extremist Feminism

Note: This post was first published in May 2011.

Feminist Satanism. No, that’s not right. Satanic Feminists. To be fair, no, it should be Feminists Who Believe Men are Pedophilic Satanists (or Satanist Pedophiles). No matter how you look at it, these words don’t immediately make sense together. This is the Rescue Industry with a vengeance – and Extremist Feminism indeed.*

Gunilla Ekberg has not appeared in public in Sweden in quite a while, I believe, but she has been giving anti-prostitution talks in Canada in support of a campaign to defeat Judge Himel’s decision to decriminalise many aspects of sex work in Ontario (Ekberg is apparently a citizen of Canada now). Admirers in Canada are billing her as a famous international lawyer, but she was publicly criticised in Sweden for calling herself a lawyer – does anyone know about Canada?  Her notoriety derives from her unyielding attitude as a campaigner, so authoritarian even some Swedes with similar ideas stopped wanting to be associated with her.

In 2005 she worked for Sweden’s Ministry of Industry as an expert on prostitution and was closely allied with ROKS, an organisation that runs shelters for women in trouble. At the time, ROKS’s management claimed Swedish patriarchy could usefully be compared to Afghanistan’s and advocated separatism: women living apart from men. As if this were not enough, ROKS management came to believe that pedophilic satanism was a real threat to girls and women in Sweden. Phew.

Other European countries have suffered mad bouts of belief in satanic cults in history, and the US is famous for its Satanic Panic all through the 1980s, but the oddity with Sweden is how such extremism can dwell so very close to mainstream government: get funding, have prestige, function as if ordinary and unremarkable.

The story of Ekberg’s embarrassing moment and public disgrace occurred in 2005, when journalist Evin Rubar (a woman) was making a programme about ROKS for Swedish Television, Könskriget (Sex War – link to first part),  in which the story of the satanic pedophiles is told, including the testimony of a young woman supposedly saved by ROKS who complains about her treatment by the rescuers. You will see in the clip below that Rubar, assuming Ekberg to have been closely involved, asks questions Ekberg refuses to answer. Leaving the room, Ekberg, assuming the microphone is off, threatens Rubar: Don’t count on any help from the shelters. The whole Sex War programme is two hours long; this is the clip in which Ekberg threatens Rubar:

Ekberg did not lose her job over this, but she did eventually leave it. The affair generated much criticism of her behaviour and that of the ROKS people, who come across as maniacs (at least one writer calling their thought patterns feminist fundamentalism, with which I concur, here on the blog and in Sex at the Margins). Numerous Swedish bloggers followed the disgraceful affair, reported here in the newspaper Aftonbladet. The ROKS manager was replaced.

Here is Part One of Sex War in Swedish, and here is a website that does a summary in English. After which, you will need a laugh.

Today, 25 June 2012, numerous people wrote to me to say, about another blogger’s post: Didn’t you write about this already? The answer is yes, in May 2011. Oh blogs, so easy to ‘absorb’. Sometimes the absorber says ‘but I only used the links you gave!’ Not good enough, say I, as defence against parasitism.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

European Women’s Lobby lies about sex trafficking, prostitution and sporting events

The European Women’s Lobby – which should not be allowed to call themselves that – continue to use public money to further a campaign that contradicts the laws of several European states that allow people to sell and buy sexual services. This red-card nonsense is part of Together for a Europe Free From Prostitution, which overtly spreads what they themselves call abolition: true missionary endeavour, even if these missionaries look like so-called liberated western women. How do they get away with this? Is there no oversight for funding to such groups? I suppose the Germans, Dutch, Czechs et al just ignore it all, but in times of purse-tightening it is annoying that zealots are allowed to throw public money around like this. I wonder what happened to the question that was put in the European Parliament about this?

Money is the key: It has become easy to get funding nowadays to campaign against trafficking; no thinking is required; just flash your ideology like a red card. Funders then get to tick the box showing they care about trafficking, which in turn makes them look good. Never mind that the message is a lie, since there is no evidence that sex trafficking increases when big sporting events take place. Evidence is irrelevant to ideological fanatics, of course, but it shouldn’t be to Brussels technocrats. Two mega-events are cited, the London Olympics, which begin in late July, and the UEFA European Football Championship, which begins any minute now.

The text accompanying this message deliberately misinterprets that evidence, provided by relatively sound investigation and staid sources.

This year, thousands of young girls and women are at risk of trafficking and sexual exploitation to satisfy the demand for prostitution on the sidelines of the Olympic Games in London and the UEFA Euro 2012 in Poland and Ukraine.

The number of human trafficking victims in Greece increased by 95% during the 2004 Olympic Games. Ahead of the 2006 World Cup in Germany, predictions were for more than 40,000 women and children to be trafficked into the country to meet the prostitution demands of millions of football fans. During the 2011 World Cup, South African authorities noted a ‘huge’ increase in the sex trade, with the number of women and girls involved in prostitution, as well as the number of brothels, doubling.

The European Women’s Lobby has called on Members of the European Parliament to take a stand against prostitution at sporting events. Nineteen MEPs supporting the EWL campaign have been invited to gather for a group photo with the EWL red card ‘Be a sport. Keep it fair… Say NO to prostitution’.

On the sidelines of this visual event, the EWL will present an awareness-raising video clip ‘Sport, sex and fun’, as well as issue a press release and briefing about prostitution at sporting events.

The evidence, once again, is:

Germany: 2006 World Cup

  • SIDA/IOM report: The first significant attempt to assess whether women were trafficked (forced) to sell sex at a major sporting event was financed by the Swedish Development Agency (SIDA) and published by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). Despite predictions that 40 000 women would be trafficked, only 5 cases of trafficking were found to be linked to the World Cup. Report published in 2006.
  • German government report: Subsequently, the German Federal Government produced a report for the Council of the European Union, finding no increase in cases of trafficking related to the World Cup. Report published in 2007.

South Africa: 2010 World Cup

Research was carried out by the Sex Work Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) and the African Centre for for Migration & Society, commissioned by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). This investigation included a survey of local sex workers; no cases of trafficking were found associated with the World Cup. Report published in 2010.

Note at the end of the EWL disinformation: More infotainment on the way! Forget the facts, show a naff video! The EWL can scarcely surpass their video of a male made miserable by licking the pussies of his clients, though: surely that ought to win some award.

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Callgirls are more honest than anti-male campaigners says Lambeth protester

ANTI-MALE RUBBISH! PROS & CALLGIRLS ARE MORE HONEST. POLICE SHOULD GET REAL CRIME.

Click twice on the photo to read the protest message stuck to a poster I wrote about last week as One London borough wants to End Demand: Clients of sex workers beware. I wonder how many posters got a sticker? This one’s on the tube escalator, surrounded by ads for musical shows and acne cures.

Thanks to Furry Girl and DrPizza for this photo.

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

One London borough wants to End Demand: Clients of sex workers beware


A friend took these photos of a parked van while having a drink in Brixton, in the London borough of Lambeth (where Waterloo Station is). Buy Sex – Pay the Price is the message, with a man’s silhouette as a sort of parody of the cliché prostitute silhouette. At first I thought this bad boy was smoking, but on closer inspection I see he is looking at a phone.

According to the sign, the consequences of getting caught buying sex are:

– be arrested
– be convicted
– receive an anti-social behaviour order
– lose your job

– lose respect from family and friends

However: No borough can unilaterally criminalise something just because they want to; they have to follow official law. Several laws prohibit particular client behaviours in the UK: paying for sex with someone found to be controlled for another person’s gainkerb-crawling and soliciting women for (sex) business. Perhaps the campaign means Lambeth police will be more aggressive in pursuing these laws. I wrote about the more drastic version of the legislation about gain when it was being considered, but all my arguments still apply to the watered-down version.

But the way the advert is worded does imply that End Demand has been imposed in a single London borough – and presumably some people will believe it, or feel too worried to do something they want to that is not actually illegal – pay for sex with an independent worker, for example, or tip a stripper or lap-dancer. This is what social-purity campaigns do: make at least some people feel worried and guilty so that they repress themselves. The advertisements were funded by Lambeth council’s Violence Against Women campaign, described in this press release.

Social Purity campaigns were linked to gender equality a hundred years ago, too – with a good deal more cause: women didn’t have the vote. That social purity as an ideal should be back in crude form in cosmopolitan Lambeth might derive from the abolitionist presence of Eaves Housing for Women, where the Poppy Project is sheltered, in the borough. Or will this idea spread to other boroughs?

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Girls who buy sex from beach boys: Sex tourism in Bali

beach boys sex touristsBeach boys and women sex tourists: every journalist’s dream topic. A Swiss television reporter interviewed me about a documentary he was making, incorporating footage from Cowboys in Paradise, a film about Kuta Beach in Bali. I happened to be in Basel, nearly missing Catherine MacKinnon when the reporter contacted me, so he came into the room where I was giving a talk and interviewed me afterwards. Some bits of those are cut into this 11-minute television clip, and although most of the English and Indonesian are overlaid with German, the pictures are good and you can follow the narrative easily. Note especially the testimonies of two women: one is the young wife of a beach boy who feels okay about how he makes his money and the other is a young Swede who asks why she shouldn’t have whatever sex she wants.

[The original embed-code is kaput so here’s a link to the video. Note here the tourists are young women. Reporters want to know if the boys are ‘really’ prostitutes and why the girls are paying; they have trouble figuring out who is exploiting whom. It’s a bias, of course, to insist someone has to be exploiting since money and sex are involved, rather than seeing these as ordinary relationships, the kind that travelling people have been having since human life began. Some want to believe that women are morally better than men and therefore won’t pay for sex just because they have the money and freedom to allow them to fly to places like Bali and do it. I don’t think women have any moral traits as a class, and the fact that some like these breezy holiday situations the same way men do doesn’t surprise me. (That’s why I end up laughing during interviews like this – because to me what I am saying is just common sense not requiring any professorial analysis.) There’s a theory that women are more keen to be romanced than men, which I consider pretty silly since plenty of male tourists have stars in their eyes and are wound around the little fingers of those poorer women they are said to be exploiting.

Then some want to see these largely white-skinned women as racist, an interpretation I also don’t share, for the same reason: travellers like to meet others who seem interesting and different; they like to talk, drink, eat, dance, tour and have sex with them. That’s banal. In such situations, travellers often can and are willing to pay for their fun, and since I don’t see having sex as different from those other activities I’d have to condemn travel itself if I am going to condemn the sex. Unless people are wanting a condemnation of global economic inequalities that mean the beach boys don’t have lots of other great ways to make money: well, fine, I condemn that. But please note that the boys interviewed here find pleasuring tourists a lot easier and more fun than other jobs. And that they don’t see themselves as sex workers or as prostitutes; no professional identity need attach to ambiguous relationships. Is this all the erotic side of imperialism? I guess so. But we are all caught up in it; there is no perfectly clean place to stand; telling people to stay home is no solution, whether they are tourists or migrants.

Other stories about sex tourism here.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sex workers at AWID reject feminist fundamentalism

kthi win plenary awid istanbul 2012I am Kthi Win from Myanmar and I am a sex worker. I manage a national organisation for female, male and transgender sex workers in Burma and I am also the chairperson of the Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers. Until now, organising anything in Myanmar has been very difficult. People ask, How did you set up a national programme for sex workers? And my answer to them is Our work is illegal. Every night we manage to earn money without getting arrested by the police. We used to work and organise together, so we use this knowledge in order to work out how we can set up the National Network without making the government angry.

This is the opening of Kthi’s plenary speech last Saturday at the AWID conference in Istanbul; at the end Kthi asked those in the hall – 1500-2000 – to stand and repeat with her Sex work is work! Most people did what she asked; no one protested. I presume hard-core abolitionists chose to stay away from this session. You can listen to Kthi’s speech, too.

laura agustin awid 2012

Photo by Debolina Dutta

I was at this event most of last week, part of a group promoting a vision of sex work, migration and feminism that emphasises agency, the state of being in action, taking power, making decisions even when presented with few options. We overtly challenged the reductionist, infantilising ideology that has come to dominate mainstream policy and faux journalism (like The New York Times’s) by attending many sessions and commenting.

I spoke at Don’t Talk to Us About Sewing Machines, moderated by Meena Seshu from SANGRAM in Sangli, India. Wi from Empower spoke first about her research into the state of sex work in Thailand; then she showed the film Last Rescue in Siam, which makes fun of police raids on bars where people are harmlessly singing and drinking. Dale from APNSW then showed a clip from a raid in India that shows sex workers physically resisting police ‘rescue’.

Rebekah Curtis of TrustLaw reported the session in The Word on Women – Anthropologist slams raids “rescuing” sex workers, and I am glad she reproduced these words of mine:

Large amounts of money go into these programmes to rescue people who in many, many, many cases do not want to be rescued, she said, adding that many women choose sex work as a preference to jobs such as domestic work.

We’re talking about the ability to recognise that someone else can make a different decision from your own about her economic or mental or emotional empowerment, she added. That if you want to rescue someone you need to know very well first what it is that they want before you rush in to help them.

I hope our interventions in this very large international women’s event have been worthwhile: one never knows.

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Changing the mentality of men who buy sex: here’s Madrid

Now Mayor of Madrid, Ana Botella has long been a staunch member of the movement to abolish prostitution. Wife of former Prime Minister Aznar (Partido Popular, conservative), she promotes measures that discourage men from paying for sex, whether that means making it criminal or changing masculine culture – or mentality, as she put it recently. Botella suggests that this could come about if men who buy were to understand that women selling are not totally free. She means that they may be trafficked, but she also refers to many prostitutes’ general situation of debility and defends the idea that protection is the correct way to care for them.

Of course there are people selling sex who are in bad straits and would like some kind of help; the question is: What kind of help can they find? What is offered to them? I am tired of abolitionists speaking as though they had a monopoly on caring and the rest of us were cold and cruel. I would hardly spend my time writing about these issues if I thought there were no problems for the people involved. I am not paid by the sex industry, as silly attacks often allege.

The critical question is: Would penalising (criminalising) men who buy sex actually help women who sell, even if they are unhappy and want to get out? The answer to that depends on what else changes in sex workers’ lives, what new options they have in terms of economy and lifestyle. If the only alternative is moralistic rehabilitation, then many women who once had a way to make money now will not. So abolitionists need to show that they have had real conversations, uncoerced, with women they think should be rescued – not make ideological pronouncements about all of them – it is actually very rude to generalise like that.

Note that Botella’s mentality-changing proposal fits the End Demand mould, the one that is not simply about passing a law against buying sex. The End Demand movement under that name originated in the US, where both selling and buying are already illegal, so instituting the so-called Nordic model would actually be progressive there, since immediately women who sell sex would be decriminalised. Changing masculine culture – unfortunately construed here as monolithic, as though all men were alike, too – is obviously a much more ambitious project. This is what poor Ashton Kutcher was trying with his ill-fated Real Men Don’t Buy Sex videos.

Botella aboga por cambiar la mentalidad a los clientes de prostitución antes que multarlos

18 enero 2012, ABC.es

La regidora de la capital apuesta por hacer saber al cliente que posiblemente esas mujeres «no son totalmente libres»

La alcaldesa de Madrid, Ana Botella, ha abogado este miércoles por “cambiar la mentalidad” de los clientes de la prostitución antes que sancionarlos añadiendo, no obstante, que el modelo sueco, en el que los clientes son penalizados, “es adecuado y está teniendo resultado”, como ha expuesto en una entrevista en Telemadrid.

“No hace falta penalizar sino pensar que las mentalidades cambian, por lo que hay que hacer saber al cliente que posiblemente esas mujeres no son totalmente libres”, ha afirmado la primera edil, que cree que así podría darse un cambio de actitud para que no se empleasen esos servicios.

También ha defendido que las administraciones deben “proteger” a las víctimas, en este caso las mujeres que, por regla general, han caído en las redes de bandas dedicadas al tráfico de personas. La prostitución, como ha señalado, atenta “contra la dignidad del ser humano, en este caso de la mujer, que normalmente se encuentra en una situación de debilidad”.

Insiders in the sex worker rights movement may find it amusing that Botella was carrying a red umbrella the other day.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sex workers and Violence against Women: Utopic Visions or Battle of the Sexes?

The other day, discussing the recommendation that DNA should be taken from men who buy sex, I ended with a question: how can anyone maintain a utopic vision about gender equality that relies on punishing so many people as criminals? That reminded me I had asked the same question in an article published more than ten years ago.

Although I wouldn’t write it exactly the same way now, I stand by its basic ideas. If Gender Equality is one of feminism’s goals, how can we imagine it without reducing everything to black and white, perpetrator and victim, crime, crime, crime? Click for the pdf or keep reading here.

Sexworkers and Violence Against Women: Utopic Visions or Battle of the Sexes?

Laura Maria Agustín

Development, 44.3, 107-110 (2001)

Sexual exploitation and prostitution

In the movement to construct a discourse of ‘violence against women’, and thus to raise consciousness about kinds of mistreatment which before were invisible, the stage has been reached where defining crime and achieving punishment appears to be the goal. While it is progressive to raise consciousness about violence and exploitation in an attempt to deter the commitment of crimes, I hope to show that the present emphasis on discipline is very far from a utopic vision and that we should now begin to move toward other suggestions for solutions.

The following argument uses the example of prostitution or ‘sexual exploitation’ as an instance of ‘violence against women’, but the approach can apply to any attempt to deal with not only definitions of gender and sexual violence but with proposals to deal with them. When applied to adult prostitution, the term ‘sexual exploitation’ attempts to change language to make ‘voluntary’ prostitution impossible. For those who wish to ‘abolish’ prostitution, therefore, this change in terms represents progress, for now language itself will not be complicit with the violence involved. For those who may or may not want to ‘abolish’ prostitution but who in the present put the priority on improving the everyday lot of prostitutes, this language change totalizes a variety of situations involving different levels of personal will and makes it more difficult to propose practical solutions. When applied to the prostitution of children, the term ‘sexual exploitation’ represents a project to change perceptions about childhood. For those who believe that the current western model of childhood as a time of innocence should become the ‘right’ of all children in the world, this term is very important.

Criminalization of clients

Efforts to change sexist, racist and other discriminatory forms of language have long been a focus of projects of social justice in western societies, and the push to define ‘violence against women’ clearly forms part of this movement. Along with this, we see a strong move to have actions that fall within these new definitions proclaimed as crimes and their perpetrators punished. If prostitution is globally redefined as sexual exploitation (by ‘globally’ I mean that no distinctions are made according to whether prostitutes say they ‘chose’ sex work to any extent), therefore, all those who purchase sexual services, called usually ‘clients’, become ‘exploiters’.

Obviously, different terms function better or coincide more with different situations, but when social movements consciously work to change language they almost inevitably eliminate these differences. Since there are still plenty of places in the world where prostitutes are simplistically viewed as evil, contaminated, immoral and diseased, campaigns to change language so as to see the lack of choice and elements of exploitation in prostitutes’ situations are positive efforts to help them. Why, then, do these positive efforts have to be based on finding a different villain, to replace the old one?

I am referring to the discipline-and-punishment model that these efforts to change language and change perception inevitably use: in constructing a victim they also construct a victimizer—the ‘exploiter’, the bad person. After that, it is inevitable that punishment becomes the focus of efforts: passing laws against the offense and deciding what price the offender should pay. This model of ‘law and order’ is familiar to most of us as an oppressive, dysfunctional criminal justice system. We know that prisons rarely rehabilitate offenders against the law; we know that in some countries prison conditions are so bad that riots occur frequently, and if they don’t, perhaps they should. We also know that it is usually extremely difficult to prove sexual offenses (because of how the law is constructed, because of the difficulty of all these definitions of victimization, because legal advice can find ways out, etc.). Yet we continue to insist on better policing and more effective punishment, as though we didn’t know all of this.

International regulations on trafficking and sexual exploitation

My own work examines both the discourses and the practical programming surrounding the European phenomenon of migrant prostitution, the term used to describe non-Europeans working in the European sex industry (and, indeed, everyone who travels from one place to another in that vast network of diverse businesses). In most countries of the European Union, migrants appear now to constitute more than half of working prostitutes, and in some countries possibly up to 90 percent (Tampep, 1999). This situation has caused a change in the thinking on violence: now ‘traffickers’ of sex workers are discussed more than their clients. Because so many of the migrants come from ‘third world’ countries, ‘trafficking’ discourses have become a forum for addressing ‘development’ projects such as structural adjustment policies of the International Monetary Fund. But the more active debates have concerned violence, in a way that constructs them as organized crime.

One of the fora of this highly conflictive discussion was the United Nations Commission for the Prevention of Crime and Penal Justice, which met various times in Vienna to elaborate protocols on the trafficking of migrant workers. Two distinct lobbying groups argued over definitions of words such as consent, obligation, force, coercion, deceit, abuse of power and exploitation. Two distinct protocols were produced, one which applies to the ‘trafficking of women and children’ while the other to ‘smuggling of migrants’. The gender distinction is clear, expressing a greater disposition of women –along with children– to be deceived (above all about sex work), and also expressing an apparently lesser disposition to migrate. Men, on the other hand, are seen as capable of migrating but of sometimes being handled like contraband, thus the word agreed on is not trafficking but smuggling. The resulting protocols now form part of the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime (UN, 2000), which member countries will debate individually and decide to sign or not.

What is the problem? In an effort to save as many victims as possible, the protocols totalize the experience of all women migrants working in the sex industry, and all those who help them migrate—a wide array of family, friends, lovers, agents and entrepreneurs, as well as small-time delinquents and (probably, but this is not proved) big-time criminal networks—are defined as traffickers. Every kind of help, from preparing false working papers, visas or passports to meeting migrants at the airport and finding them a place to stay, is defined as the crime of trafficking.

The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) specifically tries, both at the Vienna meetings and internationally, to fuse the two concepts of ‘trafficking’ and ‘prostitution’ and to define them both as crimes of violence against women. Not only everyone who helps people migrate and work in the sex industry but everyone who buys sexual services ends up defined as an exploiter, a rapist and a criminal. CATW favours legislation to penalize clients of prostitutes (CATW, 2000).

The booming sex market

The problem with proposing the penalization of sexual ‘exploiters’, or clients of prostitutes, comes from the magnitude of the phenomenon, which is almost never confronted. Statistics are unreliable for all sectors of an industry overwhelmingly unrecognized legally or in government accounting, and which operates informally and relies on bribes, legal loopholes and facades. However, we can understand from the many studies of different aspects of the sex industry that it is booming. Prostitution and exploitation sites are so numerous everywhere that customers cannot be exceptional cases (yet they are often spoken of as if they were ‘perverts’ or ‘deviants’). Rather it is clear that adult and adolescent men everywhere consider it permissible to buy sexual services, and some estimates calculate that most men do it at some time in their lives.

More than 20 years ago, one Roman prostitute calculated this way:

Rome was known to have 5,000 prostitutes. Let’s say that each one took home at least 50,000 liras a day. Men don’t go more than once a day. That means that for someone who asked 3,000 liras in a car, to arrive at 50,000 she had to do a lot, maybe twenty or so. Figure it out, 20 times 5,000 comes to 100,000 clients. Since it’s rare for them to go every day, maybe they go once or twice a week, the total comes to between 400,000 and 600,000 men going to whores every week. How many men live in Rome? A million and a half. Take away the old men, the children, the homosexuals and the impotent. I mean, definitely, more or less all men go. (Cutrufelli, 1988: 26, author’s translation)

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Men who buy sex: a nasty group whose DNA should be on file (says Farley)

A few months ago, Newsweek published a story with Melissa Farley’s dire comments about men who buy sex as the cause of prostitution and violence towards sex workers. The research paper behind that story is more scientific and less irresponsible than her previous work, thank goodness. I don’t believe there is some absolute real scientific vision we can bring to social research, but there are better and worse attempts, and this one is better. For one thing, it used the usually omitted mechanism of the control group, here comparing men who buy sex (her pathologised group) with men who don’t buy sex (belonging to the same demographic).

Farley does not like the oft-heard notion that such large numbers of men buy sex at some point in their life it becomes almost normal, since that might justify fatalistically accepting commercial sex as a timeless aspect of life impossible to eradicate. The research here concludes that men who buy sex are different from men who don’t, associated, for one thing, with other criminal activities. This leads Farley to recommend treating them more like criminals – specifically, like sex offenders. In Creating Monsters I warned that, the way things are going in the End Demand movement, clients could be conceptualised as a new category of sex offender, to be placed on the infamous registers that make living a conventional life nearly impossible for many. It turns out a few US states had already started thinking this way, and so had Farley.

She claims that non-sex-buying men are better men, based on their responses to her questions. But there is something not right in her logic, in how the supposed control group is conceived, so that she makes a point of relating what the non-buyers (the control) think about the buyers.

We asked both groups of men what words they would use to describe sex buyers. All (100%) of the sex buyers described themselves in terms of dominance (player, stud, powerful). There were differences in the descriptors they used, with more non-sex buyers labeling buyers as losers, unethical, or desperate. Fewer non-sex buyers labeled buyers as normal or as studs/players/powerful than did sex buyers (Table 12).

I am not sure why the opinions of one group of men about the other should have any bearing on the research, by the way, but, if it does, then the research needs to be balanced and tell us what the buyers said about the non-buyers. Right? I mean, maybe the buyers would say the non-buyers are losers or scaredy-cats. But the idea of control groups is not to ask one to comment on the other, and it seems to me that this asymmetry will have influenced how people responded and what the results appear to show. She doesn’t supply her questionnaire, so checking isn’t possible.

Another problem with interview technology is that the non-buyers might say nicer things about women, but we don’t know how they actually behave. Just as saying ugly things about women is disagreeable but does not in itself prove that those speaking are going to do anything bad.

Farley, however, aims to promote the idea that there is a particular type of man who buys sex, a sexist-pig type. So if we are dealing with a small, nasty group, it should be easier to wipe out prostitution. The trouble is this very view began to be debunked not so long ago in papers like The Sex Exploiter, which suggest instead that men buy sex opportunistically: not necessarily seeking out underage sex partners, for example, but rather not bothering to investigate their age. This means anyone can become a sex buyer, the way anyone can become a sex seller, given the right circumstances. And, by the way, not pathologising prostitutes as a special group (innately prone to vice) is considered everywhere an advance in our understanding of human behaviour, so why would we not do the same for clients?

In addition to placing clients on sex-offender lists, the report recommends mandatory DNA testing:

Given the criminal history of sex buyers documented in this research, one would anticipate that other criminal activity including sexual violence might occur in the future. Obtaining DNA samples from arrested johns may be useful to consider matches with evidence obtained in past and future crimes. DNA samples would be predicted to serve as a deterrent to buying sex since most people who commit crimes do not want their DNA taken.

They might do something bad later as justification for taking their DNA? Is this kind of policing really part of a utopic plan for equality of the sexes? Her Table 20. List of Esteemed Supporters for Taking DNA Samples From Arrested Sex Buyers does not help. Here we have the now well-known alliance of some feminists with Law and Order, or Discipline and Punishment, if you will.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Women Doing Things: Not waiting to be saved

A few years ago I was feeling discouraged by the volume of public discourse representing migrant women and poorer women and prostitutes and sex workers and a lot of other women as overwhelmingly passive, exploited and prone to victimhood, especially sexually. In that post, I lamented the morbid interest in showing women and children as abused and helpless, leaving aside the abundance of images of powerful politician-women and celebrities since I’m talking about regular folk. I feel pretty much the same three years later, so here is an updated group of Women Doing Things to celebrate the end of the year. Drinking Woman comes first, given the season.

Maquiladora women

Rice paddy woman

Aircraft industry women

Seducing woman

Heavy equipment driving woman

Migrating woman

Protesting women

Doctoring woman

Street-trading women

Reading woman

Rock-splitting woman

Writing woman

Performing woman

Inspiring woman

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sex slavery, the eros, ignorance

Do people want slavery to come back? It would seem that the idea is erotically compelling, granting permission to imagine naked women and children in bondage, in chains, in the thrall of evil captors. With these scenarios, viewers and readers don’t have to think, because Good and Evil are clearly identified with no chance that contradictory uncertainties will muddy one’s reactions. The ferocity with which Kristof is defended is proof that some people will not tolerate any interesting human ambiguity at all (see hostile comments).

But are visions of enslavement also attractive? A new film about an elite brothel in 19th-century France was reviewed in an extraordinarily biased way in the New York Times (whose judgement on slavery issues is now officially in doubt). After sketching what sounds like a dark, subtle, moody movie, the reviewer concludes There is only one word to describe life inside L’Apollonide: slavery.

But the reviewer sounds as though he did not understand the film or its particular artistic vision. Being set mostly inside the brothel itself, any aspect of prostitutes’ lives outside are omitted. The filmmaker has limited the stage to the usual focus in depictions of prostitutes’ lives – the workplace where they perform. The reviewer sounds very naive about women’s lives in general, including today, if he doesn’t know that we get ‘poked at’ by ‘imperious male doctors’ and feel like ‘slabs of meat’. Et cetera. Whatever he chooses to describe about this film, his conclusion that it’s about slavery is just silly.

The Life of a Courtesan, Viewed From the Inside

Stephen Holden, 24 November 2011, The New York Times

Madeline . . . is a prostitute . . . at L’Apollonide, an elegant Parisian brothel at the end of the 19th century. Early in the movie, when she entertains a handsome young client who produces an emerald, she wonders out loud if the gift is a proposal. But this tender moment is only a dream. [This is a sexist, pro-romance comment, as if marriage were so great.]

The young man, who confesses that he wants to hurt her, has other things in mind. In a subsequent encounter, he coaxes her into letting him tie her up. He produces a knife, trails it lightly across her naked body and between her lips, then slashes her from both corners of her mouth, while she emits a rending scream. . . .[Sadistic nutters exist everywhere, not only as clients in brothels.]

Demoted from courtesan to housekeeper, Madeline continues to hover on the edges of the film, a stoic, nearly silent presence. In a later scene she is the impassive erotic object of curiosity at an elaborate sadomasochistic banquet at which the madam has rented her out for the evening. [These are performances, remember.]

. . . Throughout the film there is an abundance of sumptuously photographed flesh on view. But House of Pleasures is not an erotic stimulant so much as a slow-moving, increasingly tragic and claustrophobic operatic pageant set almost entirely in the brothel. The heavy candlelit chiaroscuro paints the women as mobile Renoirs, Degases and Manets. . .[But real life is not always candlelit, even in a brothel.]

As this languidly paced film draws you ever deeper into a cloistered world, which it examines in microscopic detail, you become familiar with its rituals and breathe in an atmosphere that in the words of one character “stinks of sperm and Champagne.” And perfume and scented soap, I would add. [Why does the reviewer add this cliché?]

The movie details the rules of the house and shows the women bathing, dressing and preparing for work. Except for a daytime excursion and a brief epilogue set in contemporary Paris, it unfolds entirely inside the mansion. In one uncomfortable scene the women are lined up for minute internal examinations by an imperious male doctor, who pokes at them as if they were slabs of meat. In the days before penicillin, venereal disease was a major occupational hazard. One of the women is found to have syphilis. [And today other illnesses are hazards.]

We are told the conventional scientific wisdom of the day that prostitutes and criminals have smaller heads than other people. [That was the academic thinking of the day.]

The patrons — most of them are wealthy, older repeat customers — treat the women with a guarded, paternalistic affection that half conceals a profound condescension, one manifestation of which is the pressure on the women to act out elaborate, humiliating fantasies. One is given a chilly Champagne bath. Another goes through the jerky body language of an expressionless marionette. A third is made up as a Japanese geisha and required to speak in a kind of Asian baby talk. [Insiders will not be surprised at the odd requests of customers; nothing demonic here.]

As we become familiar with individual prostitutes, it becomes ever clearer that sex work at L’Apollonide is not a recommended means for a rebellious girl to assert her independence. The youngest, 16-year-old Pauline (Iliana Zabeth), loses her enthusiasm as she realizes there is no future in the work. The best possible outcome is the unlikely prospect of being bought by a wealthy man, which the screenplay suggests is akin to exchanging one prison for another.[Compared with what? [There were no means for rebellious girls to assert independence in the period and place of the film without being stigmatised, abandoned or worse.]

All of the women sustain debts incurred by the expense of their high-maintenance appearance. Even the madam, Marie-France (Noémi Lvovsky), whose two children and pet panther live on the premises, is a victim. When the landlord decides to raise her rent astronomically, an official she counted on for help refuses to intervene. [Standard situations for women, then and now, whether they sell sex or not.]

There is only one word to describe life inside L’Apollonide: slavery.

Nonsense. The reviewer sounds inexperienced and unsophisticated. Someone go see the film and report back, please.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

If this were about men, they would be seen as empowered: sex selection, sex trafficking and girls

In order to draw only dire conclusions about the now famous disparity in numbers between males and females in Asia, you need to view girls and women as inferior yourself. If the data showed there to be fewer males, you can be sure they would be seen to be in an advantageous position: able to pick and choose amongst prospective spouses, enjoying gender power. Instead, a surfeit of men is imagined to cause sex trafficking and bride-buying, the assumption being that when women become required, men will traffick them. Why not think women will migrate to places where they are lacking, take on traditionally female jobs and enjoy an advantage in the local marriage market or selling sex? Not the most progressive outcomes possibly but aren’t they better than being expected to wait to be victimised?

Bring Your Questions for Mara Hvistendahl

27 October 2011, Freakonomics

Her book, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, looks at how advancements in prenatal technology have led to extreme cases of gender selection across much of Asia. As economic development spurs people in developing countries to have fewer children and gives them access to technologies such as ultrasound, parents are making sure that at least one of their children is a boy. As a result, sex-selective abortion has left more than 160 million females “missing” from Asia’s population. It’s estimated that by 2020, 15 percent of men in China and northwest India will have no female counterpart. The consequences of that imbalance are far-reaching and include rises in sex-trafficking, bride-buying and a spike in crime as well.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Irresponsible talk on sex work, gender equality, sex tourism and state feminism

I gave a talk the other day that mentioned sex trafficking, sex work, surrogate motherhood, child sexuality, sex tourism and international marriage broking. Held at the Institute for Development Studies in Brighton, (UK, where the University of Sussex is), it was a lunchtime seminar, which are often small affairs, but 50 people crowded together for this one. My title was Five Steps Backward: How women become second-class citizens of globalisation, so people came who were interested in gender policy, sexualities, globalisation, migration, development and queerness.

As soon as I finished talking, a hand shot up from a woman who said it was irresponsible of me to talk that way. I had made the argument that Gender Equality policy, promoted by State Feminists (professionally employed to set policy affecting women), now tends to recreate women as always already unempowered victims rather than protagonists of their own lives who opt for one or another of the limited alternatives available – in the context of inflexible patriarchy and a globalisation that promotes precarious workers and their migrations – regardless of their sex or gender identity.

It is hardly news that a state-oriented feminist disagreed with me. Someone I ran into at the National Film Theatre bar in London said You have that effect on people. But the suggestion that I should shut up is comment-worthy. The belief in Free Speech is claimed as a fundamental characteristic of western democracies and sometimes seems like a fetish in anglo countries. At protests in the US, whether they are students on campuses or Occupy Wall Street, First Amendment rights are continually cited, and the UK is similarly insistent about free speech. Yet the objector to my talk the other day seemed to be saying that dissent is dangerous – like Mira Sorvino, who suggested I not be allowed to speak on the BBC world debate on human trafficking held  in Luxor. As though I might undermine the war on trafficking, as wartime posters warned against careless talk lest enemies benefit.

Highlights from the exchange with an apparently senior academic who did not introduce herself begin with her comment to me that

As an academic, you should – which I interrupted to say

I am not an academic.

All right, she said, as a researcher, as a person invited to talk in this space, you should not talk this way because Where do you draw the line? What about clitoridectomy? she demanded.

I stated at the beginning of my talk that I am not constructing another big all-inclusive meta-narrative that will Explain Everything once and for all.

But where do you draw the line? she insisted.

I am not in the line-drawing business. Also I have not researched clitoridectomy myself so I would not presume to pronounce about it.

This cultural relativism, she sputtered.

Cultural relativism is an anthropological tool. It means trying to understand the logic and meaning in situations from the standpoint of people inside them. It is not about defining universal Goods and Bads. Some people want to write laws that will apply to everyone all over the world in all situations. I am not doing that.

You don’t take power relations into account, she said, clearly meaning a view of power reduced to Male-Female in the abstract. I wrote recently about this in The Bad Vibrations of Fundamentalist Feminism, where I referred to World Gender War.

I take power relations into account, all right, but not the simplified one you are referring to.

From a human-rights perspective –

I don’t personally use a human-rights argument, though many others do. In debates on trafficking, everyone claims to be fighting for human rights even when their arguments are diametrically opposed.

You talk about personal choice

I did not use that term. I said that even people with few and poor alternatives can and do prefer one of them to the others.

In the neoliberal discourse, the idea of choice is very problematic —

I didn’t talk about choice, don’t put words in my mouth.

You cannot have true choice without equality.

Hm, so what are women supposed to do until absolute full and true equality is achieved?

Many are not able to articulate for themselves [what they want or need], she said.

I deeply disagree with you about that. I have complete confidence that everyone in this room can judge for themselves whether my ideas are rubbish or not.

I finally cut her off so that others in the audience could ask questions, and funnily enough one young woman returned to this point, asking the objector:

Are you saying that I am not capable of listening and figuring out for myself how I feel about what Laura is saying?

And there, alas, she backed down rather than defending her belief that people like herself Know Better than other people what the right way is to live and think about men, women, sex, money, power and many other things. She may not have meant to imply that about that woman, just about a lot of other women too poor and pathetic to make it to a room like that in Sussex. If I had invited her to come and perform this stuff I couldn’t have had a better didactic tool.

PS: She said she would be writing to me but has not, and I still don’t know her name.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Poster from American Merchant Marine at War

Originally published in Good Vibrations Magazine.

Sex offenders and clients of sex workers: creating monsters

What do sex offenders and clients of sex workers have in common? To understand why my answer is a great deal, you need to look at how outsider sexualities are constructed so that some sex is deemed to be Good, everything else to be Bad and transgressors become monsters.

I read Roger Lancaster’s 1994 book Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua ten years ago when I was looking for ethnographic accounts of non-mainstream sexualities and gender identities. Lancaster has a new book, Sex Panic and the Punitive State, which I have not read, but I was struck by his ideas in the following essay about sex offenders. Men who buy sex occupy an increasingly similar social position nowadays: considered either monsters or perverts. This year’s TIP report and the End Demand campaign insist that these men’s desires and bodies are simply wrong. Clients are not yet placed on Sex Offender Registers, but schemes to name and shame them in the media approach that idea and I will not be surprised if calling them sex offenders is proposed.

Note in an example from the other day’s Vancouver Sun: Make human traffickers’ names public: law professor. Perrin opposes Judge Susan Himel’s decision last year to remove from Ontario Law significant barriers to safe sex work (he was on Melissa Farley’s side). Perrin is a law academic who loves the police.

And don’t imagine that men called sex offenders are really bad in a way that men who buy sex are not: it’s the process of demonisation you want to keep your eye on, and how society handles those demonised.

The essay is long, so I have cut it. About halfway through I highlight with bold techniques being used and suggestions being made for further stigmatisation of a wide range of people.

Sex Offenders: The Last Pariahs
Roger N. Lancaster, New York Times, 21 August 2011

. . . most criminal justice advocates have been reluctant to talk about sex offender laws, much less reform them. The reluctance has deep roots. Sex crimes are seen as uniquely horrific. During the Colonial, antebellum and Jim Crow eras, white Americans were preoccupied with tales of sexual dangers to white women and children McCarthy-era paranoia, stories of Satanic ritual abuse and other sex panics stirred pervasive anxieties about lurking strangers. Sexual predators play a lead role in the production of a modern culture of fear.

. . . The most intense dread, fueled by shows like “America’s Most Wanted” and “To Catch a Predator,” is directed at the lurking stranger, the anonymous repeat offender. But most perpetrators of sexual abuse are family members, close relatives, or friends or acquaintances of the victim’s family. . .

. . .Advocates for laws to register, publicize and monitor sex offenders after their release from custody typically assert that those convicted of sex crimes pose a high risk of sex crime recidivism. But studies by the Justice Department and other organizations show that recidivism rates are significantly lower for convicted sex offenders than for burglars, robbers, thieves, drug offenders and other convicts. Only a tiny proportion of sex crimes are committed by repeat offenders, which suggests that current laws are misdirected and ineffective. . .

Contrary to the common belief that burgeoning registries provide lists of child molesters, the victim need not have been a child and the perpetrator need not have been an adult. Child abusers may be minors themselves. Statutory rapists – a loose category that includes some offenses involving neither coercion nor violence – are covered in some states. Some states require exhibitionists and “peeping Toms” to register; Louisiana compelled some prostitutes to do so. Two-thirds of the North Carolina registrants sampled in a 2007 study by Human Rights Watch had been convicted of the nonviolent crime of “indecent liberties with a minor,” which does not necessarily involve physical contact.

. . . Newer laws go even further. At last count, 44 states have passed or are considering laws that would require some sex offenders to be monitored for life with electronic bracelets and global positioning devices. A 2006 federal law, the Adam Walsh Act, named for a Florida boy who was abducted and killed, allows prosecutors to apply tougher registration rules retroactively. New civil commitment procedures allow for the indefinite detention of sex offenders after the completion of their sentences. Such procedures suggest a catch-22: the accused is deemed mentally fit for trial and sentencing, but mentally unfit for release. Laws in more than 20 states and hundreds of municipalities restrict where a sex offender can live, work or walk. California’s Proposition 83 prohibits all registered sex offenders (felony and misdemeanor alike) from living within 2,000 feet of a school or park, effectively evicting them from the state’s cities and scattering them to isolated rural areas.

Digital scarlet letters, electronic tethering and practices of banishment have relegated a growing number of people to the logic of “social death,” a term introduced by the sociologist Orlando Patterson, in the context of slavery, to describe permanent dishonor and exclusion from the wider moral community. The creation of a pariah class of unemployable, uprooted criminal outcasts has drawn attention from human rights activists . . . Several states currently publish online listings of methamphetamine offenders, and other states are considering public registries for assorted crimes. Mimicking Megan’s Law, Florida maintains a website that gives the personal details (including photo, name, age, address, offenses and periods of incarceration) of all prisoners released from custody. Some other states post similar public listings of paroled or recently released ex-convicts. It goes without saying that such procedures cut against rehabilitation and reintegration.

Our sex offender laws are expansive, costly and ineffective – guided by panic, not reason. It is time to change the conversation: to promote child welfare based on sound data rather than statistically anomalous horror stories, and in some cases to revisit outdated laws that do little to protect children. Little will have been gained if we trade a bloated prison system for sprawling forms of electronic surveillance that offload the costs of imprisonment onto offenders, their families and their communities.

This is the context in which End Demand campaigns are occurring. Writing on the wall.

On the panic point, I will be talking on a panel about sex scandals at the AAA in Montreal next month. Offenders, clients, scandals, panics: all related in ways I am trying to figure out.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Women as second-rate citizens of globalisation, 6 October, Brighton, talk by Laura Agustín

Five Steps Backward: How women become second-rate citizens of globalisation

Talk by Laura Agustín

6 October 2011
13.00 to 14.30

Institute of Development Studies, Knots Meeting Area
University of Sussex

Library Rd, Falmer, Brighton
East Sussex BN1 9RE

See area map
and campus map.
Trains and buses go to the campus from Brighton centre

Whether the subject is migration, surrogate motherhood, international matchmaking, tourism and expatriatism or plain old commercial sex, women are consistently assigned the passive role. They cannot make their own decisions, men pursue them relentlessly for evil ends and their sexual bodies are innately vulnerable. A Rescue Industry from the enlightened middle class is required to save women from themselves everywhere. How did we get here after 50 years of women’s liberation, affirmative action programmes and both state and UN policies to instate Gender Equality?


–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Migrants in the Mistress’s House: Other Voices in the Trafficking Debate

Here is another article that required persistence and patience to get through the academic journal review process and into publication. Migrants in the Mistress’s House: Other Voices in the ‘Trafficking’ Debate, published in 2005, used testimonies of women selling sex who do not consider themselves coerced, forced, trafficked or enslaved or who, even if they were coerced by economic circumstance, are not searching for Rescue. Click on the title for the pdf.

Migrants in the Mistress’s House: Other Voices in the ‘Trafficking’ Debate, by Laura Agustín, Social Politics, Volume 12, Number 1, 96-117 (2005).

I contrasted feminist interpretations like this:

Whatever levels of knowledge and ‘consent’ are involved, however, women are never made aware of the extent to which they will be indebted, intimidated, exploited and controlled. They believe . . . that they can travel to a richer country and earn large amounts of money in a short space of time, which they can then use to move themselves and their families out of poverty and despair. In reality, they are told they owe a huge debt which must be repaid through providing sexual services, and they are able to exercise virtually no control at all over their hours of work, the number of customers they serve, and the kinds of sex they have to provide. (Kelly and Regan 2000, 5)

with migrant testimonies like this:

I arrived in Almería through a friend’s mediation. I began to work as a domestic, I was badly paid and mistreated. Sundays I came to the edge of the sea and cried. One Sunday a Moroccan man saw me crying, I explained my situation to him, he took me to his house. I was a virgin, he promised he was going to marry me . . . he got me a residence card. . . . He found me work in a restaurant and let me stay in his studio, he told me I had to pay rent. I began to sleep with some clients from the restaurant. . . . Now, I would like to go to France, I want to get married. . . . My sister who lives in Bézier says she’s going to find me a Frenchman, to get a residence card. (Moroccan woman; Lahbabi and Rodríguez 2000, 18)

or this:

Once I was talking with a friend and she asked if I wanted to go to Spain. I knew why, so I said: ‘Ah, do you want to?’ . . . and I don’t know where she met this guy, he got the papers for us . . . the money and we left. . . . This guy went to look for work, where are the best places to work, where there are men. . . . Because one place has a lot of men, another doesn’t. . . . I worked in Logroño a month or so . . . then back to Málaga . . . a month or two, then I came here. . . . He talked first with the boss of this place . . . said he was looking for work for us. (Ukrainian woman in Spain; Agustín 2001)

The men in both stories would be called pimps and traffickers by the cited feminists.

In 2005 this was still mainly a feminist quarrel, so those are the arguments I attempted to answer. I called it Migrants in the mistress’s house in reference to working-class servants in rich people’s homes, where they may become subversive members of the family, and, in the female case, have sexual relationships with some of them that may be coerced but may also be manipulative and self-serving. Full references in the paper itself.

The Disappearing of a Migration Category: Migrants Who Sell Sex was rather directed at migration scholars, to highlight how they were leaving these migrants aside, as a ‘feminist’ issue.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Melissa Farley and the US government Want You to Stop Buying Sex: End Demand

This piece was originally published in Good Vibrations Magazine 19 July 2011.

Newsweek has released a report on Melissa Farley’s nasty new study on men who buy sex of all kinds, which was financed by the Hunt Alternatives Fund as part of their 10-year plan to End Demand for buying sex. Now the latest Trafficking in Persons Report reveals that End Demand is also part of US government policy, which means that some of the big spending – $109 million last year – on anti-trafficking programmes is going to anti-client projects. US Trafficking magnate Luis CdeBaca attended the Hunt planning meetings, so this development is hardly a big surprise. I recently wrote about a World Gender War in the form of campaigns against male sexuality: desire, penetration and the penis itself: an international trend, but money from a rich philanthropist certainly puts the US in charge.

The theory that if men stopped buying sex no one would offer it anymore is a breath-taking over-simplification of the many different services and desires involving money and sex and the multitude of social and cultural conditions involved. How people now selling sex as a livelihood would earn their living if clients disappear is never mentioned – which is disturbing. I appreciate that campaigners are talking long-term and utopically, but to never address economic and employment issues seriously? I hope they do not feel that preventing women from selling sex means saving them from a fate worse than death.

This notion of demand fails to square with some well-known client types, such as the one Thomas Rowlandson portrayed here around 1800, described by the Wellcome Library as A prostitute leading an old man into the bedroom and taking money from him, implying that her services will act like a tonic and preserve his state of health. I guess Farley didn’t manage to find any men like this to talk to.

Here is the End Demand statement from this year’s TIP, ridiculously called a Fact Sheet, when it is only a moral aside revealing the government’s wish that culture would change. Yes, they wrote the phrase new innovations.

Prevention : Fighting Sex Trafficking by Curbing Demand for Prostitution

A growing understanding of the nature of trafficking in persons has led to new innovations in addressing demand. Corporate standards for monitoring supply chains and government policies for eliminating trafficking from procurement practices are making new inroads in the fight against modern slavery. But the fact remains: if there were no demand for commercial sex, trafficking in persons for commercial sexual exploitation would not exist in the form it does today. This reality underscores the need for continued strong efforts to reduce demand for sex trafficking by enacting policies and promoting cultural attitudes that reject the idea of paying for sex.

Policies to Address Demand for Commercial Sex

Governments can lead both in practice and by example by implementing zero-tolerance policies for employees, uniformed servicemembers, and contractors paying for sex. If paying for sex is prohibited for those who work for, or do business with, a government, the ripple effects could be farreaching. Through their massive procurement, governments have an impact on a wide range of private-sector actors, and policies banning the purchase of sex could in turn reach a significant part of the private sector as well. At the same time, governments have the capacity to raise awareness of the subtle and brutal nature of this crime by requiring training of employees, contractors, and subcontractors about how individuals subjected to sex trafficking are victimized through coercion. Too often, trafficking victims are wrongly discounted as “consenting” adults. The use of violence to enslave trafficking victims is pervasive, but there are other more subtle forms of fraud and coercion that also prevent a person from escaping compelled servitude. A prostituted person may have initially consented, may believe that she or he is in love with her or his trafficker, may not self-identify as a victim, may not be operating in the vicinity of the pimp, or may have been away from the pimp’s physical control with what seemed to be ample opportunity to ask for help or flee. None of these factors, taken alone or in sum, means that she or he is not a victim of a severe form of trafficking. Ensuring that these facts are part of the required training for every government employee and everyone who does business with or on behalf of a government is an important step in shifting attitudes about commercial sex.

Moral Leadership in the Future of this Struggle

Strong policies are critical for ridding countries of all forms of modern slavery, but ultimately for encouraging a broader cultural shift in order to make meaningful progress in reducing demand for sex trafficking. This can only be achieved by rejecting long-held notions that regard commercial sex as a “boys will be boys” phenomenon, and instead sending the clear message that buying sex is wrong. Lawmakers have the power to craft effective antitrafficking legislation, but they also have a responsibility to represent values that do not tolerate abuses of commercial sex. Business leaders need to cultivate a corporate culture that leaves behind outdated thinking that turns a blind eye to the sex trade, including the adoption of codes of conduct that prohibit purchasing sex. And leaders in civil society – from teachers to parents to ministers – must foster the belief that it is everyone’s responsibility to reduce the demand for sex trafficking. It is especially important to reach young men with a strong message of demand reduction to help them understand the exploitation involved with commercial sex and combat the glamorization of pimp culture. It is every person’s individual responsibility to think about their contributions to trafficking. Laws and policies, partnerships and activism will continue to be critical to the struggle against modern slavery, but it will also be the day-to-day decisions of individual men and women that will bring an end to sex trafficking and carry forth a message of freedom for all.

UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons
Washington DC June 2011

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist