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

17 thoughts on “Changing the mentality of men who buy sex: here’s Madrid

  1. Maggie McNeill

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

    She also obtained something of value (a political position) via a sexual relationship with a man. Ah, irony!

    Reply
  2. Kris

    I think we can at least minimise our demand of everything!!! There’s a lot of overconsumption in the world. We buy lots of things we really don’t need, to the detriment of our environment and Earth’s resources. And a lot of people suffer while producing all those things and services we really don’t need. Including prostitution! We must see it broader, it’s not only prostitution, it’s everything, all labour, all production, all consumption. Unfortunately we need construction workers and nurses and teachers to survive. They suffer while doing their work. But we can’t do without them. We don’t need prostitutes. Prostitution is a form of entertainment. We can organise the world in such a way that people don’t need to work in prostitution. At least the suffering of people working in prostitution will disappear. We can do that for humanity. All work is horrible, but we can make sure that people only work to produce the services or products we strictly need. From that point of view you can advise men not to visit sex workers. Because when visiting a prostitute you abuse a person who works, while providing a service to you you don’t strictly need to survive. The same thing goes for visiting an entertainment park or a restaurant. Or buying and driving an expensive car. Or buying a car at all.

    Reply
    1. laura agustin Post author

      Sheldon points out what I was going to: that you isolate buying sex as the only kind of consumption that is not really necessary. No one can make sweeping statements about the needs of the whole planet, that is fundamentalism. Some people refuse to eat meat or wear leather in order to avoid killing animals for consumption – fine, for them that is the most important thing that is not needed. Other people believe no one should be allowed to smoke tobacco anywhere – it is unnecessary. Art is, of course, unnecessary. Then as Sheldon says, all other types of entertainment in which someone working to produce them might be unhappy – no problem there? These easy dismissals of complexity characterise abolitionism.

      Reply
    2. Gregory A. Butler

      In a world where half the population lives on less than US $ 2 a day, saying that the biggest problem is “overconsumption” is absurd.

      The biggest problem for the working classes of the world is that WE DON’T CONSUME ENOUGH. That even applies to the working classes in America, Western Europe, the Gulf States and East Asia.

      As for your claim that all workers are suffering just because we have to go to work at jobs, that’s absurd too.

      Work in an of itself is a good thing – healthy human beings need to work to stay sane.

      The biggest problems faced by all workers under capitalism is that we don’t rule the world, the rich do, and that our incomes aren’t enough for us to consume all that we need.

      This applies to sex workers just as much as it does to construction workers, nurses and teachers.

      Reply
      1. laura agustin Post author

        Thanks, Gregory, yes that was another silly generalisation – that the biggest world problem is over-consumption. And that everyone doesn’t find work to be horrible. The comments seem to come from someone too rich or comfortable for her or his own good!

        Reply
  3. Sheldon

    Excuse me, Kris, but how do you know “we” don’t need prostitutes? Because you don’t need them, you generalize base on your self-assessment?

    See, I don’t need them for myself, but I am humble enough to admit that I do not speak for everybody. I certainly have no desire to dictate what is “strictly necessary”.

    In your world view, will all entertainment be abolished because you deem it unnecessary for survival? No movies, no TV, no theatre, no poetry?

    Reply
  4. Thaddeus Blanchette

    Downtown doing interviews with prostitutes in Rio on Friday. One of the women flat-out told me “I want to be out of prostitution by Carnaval. That is my goal. But you know, it’s so damned hard to leave it. Almost impossible.”

    “Why?” I asked her.

    She looked at me as if I had water on the brain. “Because where else am I going to find a job that pays me enough to support my son?”

    Earlier, she had reported that she had worked as a maid, a beautician and a telemarketer. None of those jobs had paid even one-fifth the money she makes as a prostitute.

    This is the “coercion” that these folks talk about and it is almost entirely economic. If people like Botella want to get rid of prostitution, then they need to generate economic alternatives for the men and women in the lower ranks of the working class.

    Emma Goldman talked about this in 1910, but a century later, the prohibitionists still haven’t grasped the nut of the question: it’s economics, dummies!

    Reply
    1. Laura Agustín

      Yes, which is what irritates about abolitionists taking the high ground and proposing culture change and doing without commercial sex as it isn’t necessary. They want to talk about utopia, the society in which prostitution doesn’t exist. It would seem obvious that they are the ones that should be interested in attacking so-called root causes and providing more jobs attractive to the people they want to stop selling sex. Instead they don’t even try.

      Reply
  5. Quiet Riot Girl

    re: art being ‘unnecessary’ for human survival I saw a programme on tv a while ago saying that just as we need food to nourish our bodies, so we need art to nourish our soul, or mind, our imagination.

    Have you ever known a human society without art?

    Reply
    1. Laura Agustín

      I guess antis would say that we have missed the point here, that they are limiting the topic to ‘sex’ and talking about art has nothing to do with it. Fundamentalism does this, sets up boundaries, doesn’t tend to see the interconnections that make things complicated.

      Reply
      1. Sergio Meira

        It sometimes seems to me that the antis’ viewpoint needs these boundaries because sex is a culturally loaded topic in Western society: it is an activity with many important taboos, and one with symbolic value (traditionally, a ‘lower’ activity that turns the mind away from the higher spheres; more modernly, your ‘inner self’, that which defines you as a gendered person). It is ambivalent: good (‘healthy’, ‘expression of love’, ‘intimacy’) but bad (‘private’, ‘shame’, ‘dangerous’, ‘think of the children!’). Because of this symbolic importance and this ambivalence, we want sex not to be connected to other things (so we don’t have to deal also with sex when considering these other things), we want it to stand out, to be isolated, to be a separate topic treatable without connection to other things.

        Reply
        1. Laura Agustín

          This is a good summary and possibly correct about how anti-prostitutionists reason. But why should this taboo be opposed by so many people who don’t reason that way? It seems odd.

          Reply
  6. Kris

    In the past I thought that work is not a big deal compared to prostitution. That prostitution is completely different. Partly thanks to Laura Agustín I know that this is not true (also thanks to Sheila Jeffreys). What’s special about prostitution is the physical contact that the worker receives from the client. That is a characteristic that other work doesn’t have. But prostitution has many similarities with other forms of labour, like the risks of getting stress or a burnout, or getting physically injured, the risk of being attacked by a client. Some prostitutes have debts with loan sharks or human traffickers. The same is true for some other workers as well. They are in a similar situation. Many people have to work hard to pay off the mortgage of their house. This looks very much like debt bondage.

    Work is often dangerous. More people die as a result of labour accidents than as a result of armed conflicts. Many people work long hours behind a computer, which can cause repetitive strain injury, which can make you disabled for years. I have experienced that myself (I have a terrible RSI).

    You can’t work your whole life as a construction worker or as a nurse, or in agriculture. At the age of 40 or 50 your body (your back) will be damaged to such an extent, that you must stop doing this work.

    Labour is often very stressful. Often you must work with very high speed and efficiency, many hours a day. Many people have burnouts because of their work.

    I have deep psychological problems (many anxieties) which causes me to live on welfare. In a way I am privileged because I have escaped this awful system. I am actually very afraid to find work. I have heard many horror stories from relatives and friends who work: burnouts, surgeries because of back problems (hernia) caused by work, pestering at work, conflicts with colleagues and superiors. Probably I won’t be hired by anybody because I don’t have a lot of experience with labour, and because of the stigma that I have (my mental problems, the fact that I am officially declared unfit for work). I have worked in the past at two employers but I was fired after several days because I simply couldn’t keep up and I made a lot of mistakes.

    Perhaps it’s not prostitution per se that is the big problem. It is labour. That’s why I propose to minimise all labour as much as possible. Not to minimise joy or poetry. Why entertain yourself if it might hurt others? Roller coasters are very cool! But a construction worker might get injured while building it. So I propose – for instance – not to build roller coasters! Writing poetry doesn’t hurt a person. I think it is okay to enjoy yourself, as long as it doesn’t hurt others.

    It is not true that we should consume more. There’s enough food in the world to feed all people in the world. Lots of food is thrown away or even destroyed to keep food prices at high levels. Why not simply give people food? Why should we let them work in slavery? I propose to simply give food or money to a person instead of asking something in return. Okay, I haven’t done that myself, I’m very hypocritical. And I visit prostitutes. But I feel a bit ashamed and uneasy about it. I have promised myself on multiple occasions never to visit a prostitute again. But after several months I do it anyway. I have met prostitutes who really seem to hate their work. There are prostitutes who are forced in a horrible way to do this work. Saying that men should stop visiting prostitutes sound silly. But why? If men stop visiting prostitutes, at least these horrible cases will stop. I think it is worth the sacrifice, even if it would be true that most prostitutes are not coerced to do this work, or hate this work. It will make the world a tiny bit better. And of course our economy must change. Let’s share everything equally, don’t let people starve because they don’t work. I think socialism or communism is a good alternative compared to the current system. I am very positive about Cuba. They have very low ecological footprint while still maintaining a high standard of living. It would be even better if they have free speech and free elections though.

    Reply
    1. Laura Agustín

      Many of us, rich and poor, love work. Much of what you describe as suffering and hardship – perhaps because of your own lack of significant experience – we find fulfilling, meaningful, creative, interesting. Even the frustrations of many jobs provide a way to interact with the world, to belong to the social fabric.

      So again we have here one’s own particular and personal experience being extrapolated to the whole universe. It is just silly to generalise so much.

      As for the idea that sex work is different because of the physical contact: what about dentists and surgeons, if you think that one person inserting part of their body into another’s is so special? There is no difference, unless you are going to repeat the claim that the sexual organs are different, that they have some spiritual significance that mouths don’t. As I’ve often said, that is a quasi-religious belief everyone is entitled to, but assuming everyone sees things that way and imposing the view is fundamentalism.

      Reply
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