Sex as labour

In my circle of friends it is considered rude to troll for business during festive occasions, especially if you are a plus one. One of my nieces, who I interact with mostly on FB, taught pole dancing for years and posts pictures of herself and her daughter.  As an art form that requires really great body control and muscle strength I much prefer aerial silk performances to pole dancing. However it seems to me that is her choice not mine.

JKR these are silly hyperbolic baiting questions.   She's giving her opinion, not dictating anyone's lives.    If you feel Pondering is stigmatizing and degrading sex workers, post some quotes from her that you feel do this and explain your position.   

okay so the stigma...created by the anti sex work crusaders over 120 years of casting us as the vectors of disease, money hungry, victims, damaged.... and by criminalization.... which makes us unable to "out" oursleves generally - not me I am out of the closet - 

is now your justification as to why it should not be accepted and why we should not be invited to parties? or meet our partners families?

Mobo2000 if you cannot see where sex workers have been disparaged in this thread then you are blind - see my post 152 - Pondering is quoted and discusses how sex workers have sex with married men and how sex workers are pitied by women like her as a result of our work.....then maybe take a look back and read this entire thread....

our clients are not "married men" - sometimes they are if in a loveless relationship for example being maintained for the sake of the children - but mostly they are not. 

Pondering's ignorance about sex workers lives and reliance on her feelings to define her biased and uninformed persepctive on sex work as the foundation of her position, is degrading, dismissive and harmful.

it is because of attitudes like Ponderings that my community are placed at such extreme risk.

why can't sex workers report violence? because of attitudes like Ponderings

why can't sex workers be open with the doctors? because of attitudes like Ponderings

why can't sex workers be "out" to their families? because of attitudes like Ponderings

Because of attitudes like Ponderings sex workers are forced to be secretive,  forced to live in isolation and cannot find fundamental justice via the path any other easily identifiable group/ visible minority in this Country use like the government.

Pondering - your framing of this under a "no one at a party wants to hear about sex work" or "don't give husbands business cards" or whatever other asinine reference you are making - is ludacris. you have no idea - once again - who we are, who we tell, how we interact at social events or anything about us really...at all....

your narrow reading of anti sex work crusader rhetoric and the experiences of survivors of violence does not make you an expert..... your attitude demonstrates the broader societal exclusion of sex workers from main stream community life and is reminiscent of the antiquated by-laws found in cities about these issues - person of evil repute, etc - 

why.... why would you think a 120 year old policy of exclusion and criminalization would work now? suddenly after a century? it's going to work?

it didn't even "abolish sex work"....which isn't 120 years long enough to determine whether the policy will work...? sure some sex workers were abolished via murder..... but that doesn't really seem to achieve the stated goal of protecting the safety of women....

rather it seems to support my interpretation of why anti sex work crusaders do what they do.... hatred.... they want to punish us, they want to degrade us, they want us to be killed, they want us to disappear....why else would anti sex work crusaders continue to beat the drum of abolition? given the total failure of their policies to do anything except for kill and harm members of my community?

a horrible example of this violence generated by the anti sex work crusaders is in the news today;

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/incel-massage-parlour-guilty-1.6582534

Incel ideology or involuntary celibacy grew as an online misogynistic subculture and is commonly characterized by a hatred or blame against women for an inability to find a romantic or sexual partner. The term gained widespread attention in 2018 when a man who posted about a so-called "incel rebellion" drove a van down a sidewalk in Toronto, killing 10 people and injuring 16 others. 

According to an agreed statement of facts, the woman who survived the attack managed to seize a nearly half-metre-long sword from the attacker after she had been stabbed repeatedly, and turned the weapon on the man, stabbing him in the back and ending the rampage.

As he attacked her, the teen told her, "Die, die, die," calling her a "stupid whore."

After stabbing the man, the woman then managed to go to a neighbouring business and asked someone inside to call police.

Court was shown a 20-minute compilation of surveillance video in which the young man was seen stabbing Arzaga, the massage parlour's receptionist, to death. The footage begins with the teen leaving his home on foot less than two kilometres away from the spa and showed in graphic detail the moment when he pulled out the sword, killing Arzaga.

Family members and loved ones of the victims were visibly emotional, hugging one another as the scenes played on large screens in the courtroom.

Concerning brothels, if a woman sees 5 men a day, 5 days a week, 48 weeks a year that is 1,200 men.  That could be as few as five different men. Statistic are great fun.

Pondering wrote:

That's just one person, one legal brothel. She could be exagerating. It is for each of us to judge her credibility and consider how common or uncommon her experience was. To me she sounds very believable. I am reminded of Stockholm Syndrome. 

Most experts on sex work seem to be saying that criminalization makes sex work worse for sex workers and that decriminalization would make sex work better and safer for them. Why shouldn’t sex workers be allowed to mostly manage and regulate their industry as other workers mostly manage and regulate their industries?

you know nothing about labor organizing .....especially for sex workers....

you also know nothing about hate crimes and violence experienced by our community.

framing that murder as the fault of the women working there was really low.... beneath any kind of reasonable discussion.... those women were working in the sex industry, those women were "commodifying themselves"....

what's next?

people killed in LGBTQ2 night clubs should have known better than to be there and got themselves killed?

you really represent the epitome of why these issues exist..... no matter what happens, you justify it as the fault of our community.... we did this to ourselves....

120 years..... 120....... who did this? deny it's been that long all you want. i have seen the archives detailing our criminalization here in Vancouver, i have seen the police corruption and the rebellion of the sex workers here.... i have seen the social gospel movement and suffragettes with their hate.... this has been 120 years....

this is what you all wanted, to see us harmed, to abolish us.....

don't pretend it isn't and stop trying to justify yourself with the tired old myths which have plagued us for so long...

it makes me ill to think if the family of the woman killed were to see your callous comments

The new labour activism. If you don't like it, quit. Let people who enjoy the job do it. 

Far better than any who would say, "if I don't like that job other people are doing I should make them stop."  I will leave the organizing of sex workers to the sex workers themselves but in the meantime indeed I would tell anyone in an exploitative job to quit or go on strike with your coworkers. Those are the only options for lousy jobs.

You are making moral arguments not labour arguments. Your posts sound like you think that sexual intercourse should not be something humans should accept money for. I have never accepted money for sex nor offered it but when I was a teenager and on the streets I did sleep with various people merely to have a roof over my head. What people want to do to make money to pay the rent is their choice not mine. The fact that you can find graphic pictures of how exploitative it can be does not change the fact that rights belong to workers not do-gooders.

"in the meantime indeed I would tell anyone in an exploitative job to quit or go on strike with your coworkers. Those are the only options for lousy jobs."    

The quit option assumes there is replacement work available and one will not starve or be homeless if they quit.   I see your response here as dancing around the issues Pondering is raising regarding what counts as consent and whether the exploitation in "selling sexual intercouse" is inherent and unavoidable.  I would think you would have some sympathy for these concerns.   Not an Andrea Dworkin fan, I gather.

I agree there is a moral component to this discussion around selling sex, yes.   Sex is probably the topic humans moralize about the most.  It is an activity that humans are very interested in, invested in and have organized society around.   I think there will always be some stigma around selling sexual intercourse because of this.   

I also deeply feel that under capitalism, the structural pressue is to make each and every human interaction or piece of what we might consider "the commons" a commodity, and that this should be resisted.    I don't know what to do with these feelings but they are there.

I support the right of sex workers to organize, and I think if we do get decriminalization it will lead to safer work conditions and better income security for the sex workers who are able to join.   But I also think full legalization has to follow, with rules that spell out working conditions in line with other industries where there is similar potential for health risks to the workers and clients.   

After decrim/legalization, the measures our government would be willing to take to ensure it does not lead to increases in human trafficking, sex tourism, etc are an open question.   I am not sure, given the large numbers of immigrants working Toronto massage parlours, that this would be something our government would or could deal with successfully. 

Mobo2000 wrote:

I see your response here as dancing around the issues Pondering is raising regarding what counts as consent and whether the exploitation in "selling sexual intercouse" is inherent and unavoidable.  I would think you would have some sympathy for these concerns.   Not an Andrea Dworkin fan, I gather.

"She described a male supremacist political ideology manifesting in and constituted by rape, battery, prostitution, and pornography."

Here is a wiki version of her controversial views for those who don't know Dworkin.

Criticism

Dworkin's discursive style, coupled with antipathy for her views, produced sharply polarizing debate. She was viewed with derision and scorn: "People think Andrea's a man-hater, she gets called a Fascist and a Nazi—particularly by the American left, but it's not detectable in her work." While often polarizing among the left, Dworkin's views were indeed also divisive in conservative circles, eliciting both praise and condemnation from right-wing critics. After her death, the conservative gay writer and political commentator, Andrew Sullivan, claimed that "[m]any on the social right liked Andrea Dworkin. Like Dworkin, their essential impulse when they see human beings living freely is to try and control or stop them—for their own good. Like Dworkin, they are horrified by male sexuality, and see men as such as a problem to be tamed. Like Dworkin, they believe in the power of the state to censor and coerce sexual freedoms. Like Dworkin, they view the enormous new freedom that women and gay people have acquired since the 1960s as a terrible development for human culture." Libertarian/conservative journalist Cathy Young complained of a "whitewash" in feminist obituaries for Dworkin, arguing that Dworkin's positions were manifestly misandrist, stating that Dworkin was in fact insane, criticizing what she called Dworkin's "destructive legacy", and describing Dworkin as a "sad ghost" that feminism needs to exorcise.

Other feminists, however, published sympathetic or celebratory memorials online and in print. Catharine MacKinnon, Dworkin's longtime friend and collaborator, published a column in The New York Times, celebrating what she described as Dworkin's "incandescent literary and political career", suggested that Dworkin deserved a nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and complained that "lies about her views on sexuality (that she believed intercourse was rape) and her political alliances (that she was in bed with the right) were published and republished without attempts at verification, corrective letters almost always refused. Where the physical appearance of male writers is regarded as irrelevant or cherished as a charming eccentricity, Andrea's was reviled and mocked and turned into pornography. When she sued for libel, courts trivialized the pornographic lies as fantasy and dignified them as satire."

Other critics, especially women who identify as feminists but sharply differ with Dworkin's positions and strategies, have offered nuanced views, suggesting that Dworkin called attention to real and important problems, but that her legacy as a whole had been destructive to the women's movement. Her work and activism on pornography—especially in the form of the Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance—were criticized by liberal groups such as the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force (FACT).

Dworkin was also met with criticism from sex-positive feminists, in what became known as the feminist sex wars of the late 1970s and 1980s. The sex wars were a series of heated debates that polarized feminist thought on a number of issues relating to sex and sexuality. Sex-positive feminist critics criticized Dworkin's legal activism as censorious, and argued that her work on pornography and sexuality promoted an essentialist, conservative, or repressive view of sexuality, which they often characterized as "anti-sex" or "sex-negative". Her criticisms of common heterosexual sexual expression, pornography, prostitution, and sadomasochism were frequently claimed to disregard women's own agency in sex or deny women's sexual choices. Dworkin countered that her critics often misrepresented her views, and that under the heading of "choice" and "sex-positivity", her feminist critics were failing to question the often violent political structures that confined women's choices and shaped the meaning of sex acts.

However, in the 21st century, Dworkin has garnered favor with younger generations of feminists, whether Gen X, Y, or Z, such as Lily Pazner (b. 2006), Lauren Oyler (b. 1991), Moira Donegan (b. 1989), Jennifer Szalai (b. 1979-80), Michelle Goldberg (b. 1975), and Joanna Fateman (b. 1974), who grew up with anti-radical "sex positive feminism" and found it lacking in depth of analysis and action.

In 1989, Dworkin wrote an article about her life as a battered wife in the Netherlands, "What Battery Really Is", in response to Susan Brownmiller, who had argued that Hedda Nussbaum, a battered woman, should have been indicted for her failure to stop Joel Steinberg from murdering their adoptive daughter. Newsweek initially accepted "What Battery Really Is" for publication, but then declined to publish the account at the request of their attorney, according to Dworkin, arguing that she needed either to publish anonymously "to protect the identity of the batterer" and remove references to specific injuries, or to provide "medical records, police records, a written statement from a doctor who had seen the injuries". Instead, Dworkin submitted the article to the Los Angeles Times, which published it on March 12, 1989.

In the late '80's I used to wear a button that said "Real Men Don't Need Porn". I also thought that Andrea's views on some issues wer right but far better articulated by others whose writing did not include assessment based on biological determination of gender characteristics. Most things about humans are on a spectrum and that includes the testosterone effects that produce misogynist alpha males. Those effects are enhanced by our military war culture from Hollywood that makes sensitive men the outlier and assholes the heroes.

I presently believe that like race gender is as much a social construct as it is a biological fact and that seems to stand in opposition to some of Dworkin's views. 

Pondering said - One of the things I see happening in this thread is the repeated conception of prostitution as one thing, all or nothing, either every work model is fine or they are all condemned. 

To be clear - I have never said that, never, no sex worker orgs say that.... we all discuss the different issues across the spectrum and we all bring our differing experiences to that discussion. It's called intersectionality. There are different issues facing everyone in our community relating to gender diversity, economic situation, race, immigrant status, trauma and much more....

and melissa farely..... is not a researcher... just saying.... she has been declared a lobbyist and her opinions given no weight in court for good reason. reading her work will not further your understanding the very complex issues faced by our community.

for clarity - when i say "our community" i mean sex workers

I am really happy to see that strip clubs are dying out.

I find it very funny that you guys know way more than I do about feminist ideology.

I have been reading feminist authors since I was twenty and living with my first wife. In 1972 we were young and single and loved reading and discussing the world. We subscribed to MS and Rolling Stone, both of which in the the early 1970's published excellent pieces. I have never considered blissful ignorance to be a particularly good thing.  When I went back to uni at thirty nine my Political Studies reading lists for my courses included numerous books I had read while I worked camp jobs in construction.

I find your use of the term ideologue to describe all intellectual thinkers very telling. It is a right wing thing to dismiss intellectualism and prefer populist easy to digest slogans. You seem to be pushing the idea that all intellectuals are in fact uncompromising and dogmatic. I think that explains the incoherence of much of your analysis. If you dismiss all deep thinkers as ideologues then you are left with MSM fluff.

It seems like social media and sites like onlyfans are the new prostitution.

The Dr Phil "Cash me ousside, how bout dah?" girl makes 4-million a month.

which ....onlyfans and pornhub are also under attack... by anti sex work crusaders ... right now.... under Bill C-11...... with staunch abolitionist Milleville Duscene at the helm.... so same story... same old problem... so called feminists attacking the livelihoods of sex workers

even though those are legal, the stigma and attempts to destroy our community don't change