Hilla Kerner joined Vancouver Rape Relief thirteen years ago. Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter is the longest standing rape crisis centre in Canada. Since 1973, the group who is self organized as a collective has responded to close to 46,000 women seeking support in their escape from male violence. Since they opened their transition house in 1981, they have housed over 3,000 women and over 2,600 children.
They serve 1200 women a year, and house roughly 100 women fleeing violence at any given time. Many of the women they service are poor, indigenous, and have been prostituted. Vancouver Rape Relief is sustained by grassroots donations. You can donate to the organization here.
This interview with Hilla Kerner took place on May 26, 2019, on Derrick Jensen‘s radio show “Resistance Radio,” which is broadcast on the Progressive Radio Network.
Derrick Jensen is a coauthor of Deep Green Resistance, and the author of Endgame, The Culture of Make Believe, A Language Older than Words, and many other books. He was named one of Utne Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World” and won the Eric Hoffer Award in 2008. He has written for Orion, Audubon, and The Sun Magazine, among many others.
Resistance Radio covers ecology and feminist themes. Episodes can be found on YouTube or browse all of the interviews in our Resistance Radio archive.
Hilla Kerner can also be found on Twitter, where she is outspoken on issues of poverty, destruction of the planet, and violence against women.
Australia has different legislations in regards to prostitution in each state. For example New South Wales has almost full decriminalisation and definitely in favour of brothel owners, less so for individual, who can be charged for “living on the earnings of prostitute” or soliciting for prostitution outside dwelling, school, church or hospital. In Victoria street sex work is illegal and brothels and premises based work needs to be licenced. In reality, NSW police reports show that legal operations have connections to organised crime, drug and people trafficking and in Victoria we are seeing surge in premises, both registered and under the cover of massage parlours and unchecked conditions and practices within registered brothels.
While many countries in Europe and recently in the US (US Greens Party voted for change in policy on prostitution and support the Nordic Model) the push to introduce the abolitionist approach has been coming from the left in the name of justice and equality for women, in Australia the left has been supporting the “sex worker” lobby groups and the sex industry itself, contributing to normalisation of sex purchase by men and expansion of the sex trade industry.
It came as a bit as a surprise to see that in April a branch of Victorian Liberal Party proposed a motion in support of the Nordic Model, which aims at addressing the demand for prostitution via penalising the buyer and not targeting those who are in prostitution.
It also came as a surprise to have a very public supporter of the Nordic Model within the Greens Party, Kathleen Maltzahn, state that she won’t support the Vic Liberal Party’s motion for the Nordic Model if and when it goes up for a vote. Maltzahn is known for her grass roots work, Project Respect, an exit program for women in prostitution, which she established after working in Philippines and seeing first-hand the insidious nature of sex trade. She has been going against her own party’s policy, which supports full decriminalisation. She has been widely criticised by those in her own party as well as those in the pro sex lobby groups. Upon the release of her statement, a criticism also came from parts of the abolition movement. I does look like a significant pressure has been placed upon her from the party leaders to make that statement. One thing is clear, we need more radical feminist analysis of prostitution in the Green’s party, more radical feminists being active within the mainstream left to bring about change.
Many activists within the abolishion movement hesitate at working with the Liberal Party or Christian organisations, due to disagreements on details or due to their stand regarding other women’s rights issues.
I have asked Simone Watson, director of Nordic Model Australia Coalition, what she thinks about working with the Liberal Party on this and she said this:
“My concerns around the Victorian Liberal Party endorsement of the Nordic/Abolitionist Model were that their first proposal was not in fact the Nordic/Abolitionist model at all.
“The initial draft was a serious red flag to me as it only focused on criminalising buyers in illegal brothels. It is already illegal to buy sexual access in illegal brothels. Yes, it aimed to decriminalise the prostituted women in those same brothels, but offered no exit programs and no changes to legislation across the board. So my reading of it was that it would be doomed to failure. I do not think my concerns around such a premise are unwarranted. It failed to take in to account the inefficacy of prohibition laws on prostitution; it failed to capture the intrinsic and essential point of the abolitionist approach. Their proposal was still rooted in the dangerous ground of prohibition. And prohibition fails. Some saw this as at least a start, however, the Nordic/Abolitionist Model cannot be undertaken half-baked. To do so would be incredibly dangerous and anathema to the law they claimed to be endorsing. To their credit they have since recognised that their initial proposal was incomplete.
“Do I trust them? Well, I have some trust, especially as they took considerable time to listen to survivor’s and our allies’ concerns on this. They certainly have taken more time than the Greens or Labor, which is why the Green Party USA should be commended for their determination to support the abolition of the sex trade and all major parties here should take note of that.
“For me, working with political parties as a sex-trade abolitionist is fraught because I often do not agree with many of their other policies. For example the Liberal’s alliance with anti-woman organisations, those who are against abortion and so on. But if a party is truly dedicated to abolishing the sex-trade, extinguishing the ongoing commodification of women, and women’s rights to be free from sexual exploitation, then I will support them on that particular policy. Again it is hard to trust any particular party on this issue, but if they are willing to amend their initial proposal and actively endorse the Nordic/Abolitionist model as it is intended in full, I support that unequivocally.”
Simone’s response highlights critical issues in approaching the Nordic Model with wrong motivation, poor understanding of the process involved as well as half-baked financial commitment, all critical to its success.
To summarise, the Nordic Model requires a three pronged approach:
Establishment of exit and support programs for people in prostitution.
Education of the public and retraining of the police
Enforcement of the new laws by providing funding to dedicated police people and social workers.
The laws themselves aim at stoping trafficking and curbing growth of the global sex trade via penalising the buyers and pimps.
Other important news from Australia is the upcoming Australian Summit Against Sexual Exploitation (ASASE) on 27-28 of July in Melbourne. Key speakers of the summit on the subject of prostitution are:
Julie Bindel (UK)
Sabrinna Valisce (SPACE International)
Simone Watson (Normac)
Sarah M Mah (Asian Women for Equality, Canada)
I’m hoping that the summit will bring more allies to the abolition movement in Australia, who can then plan for the consultation process needed when the Nordic Model gets a motion vote in Victoria.
Joanna Pinkiewicz is a DGR Australia member; environmental activist, women’s right activist artist and mother.
Featured image: Bridget Perrier speaking at Julie Bindel’s book launch. Image: YouTube. Numerous ex-prostituted women spoke at Julie Bindel’s book launch in London, telling the raw, brutal truth about the sex industry.
Prostitution or sex work? Your choice of words gives the game away, marks out where you stand on the issue. Violence against women or just a job? It is a serious battleground for the soul of feminism.
Into this contested territory lands Julie Bindel’s well-researched book, The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Work Myth. At a time when “sex work” appears to be gaining ground in official circles, Bindel is a passionate abolitionist, meaning she does not believe that decriminalization or legalization can protect prostituted women from the inherent violence of prostitution. As such, she advocates for what’s commonly known as the Nordic Model, in which johns, pimps, and profiteers are criminalized and prostituted women are supported to exit the industry. To date, versions of this model have been adopted by Sweden, Norway, Northern Ireland, Canada, Iceland and France.
Unsurprisingly, the Nordic model is vociferously opposed by those who profit from the sex industry, because it will decrease demand, though they choose to cite concern for the women’s safety instead, saying criminalizing pimps and johns will drive the trade underground. However, as a Swedish police officer quoted in Bindel’s book says:
“How can women in Sweden be in more danger than they were before the law? When all she has to do is pick up the phone, even if [the punter] is rude to her, and we will arrest him because he is already committing a crime.”
The panel at Bindel’s book launch in London, attended by more than 400 people, featured three women who have exited the sex trade: Sabrinna Valisce from New Zealand; Bridget Perrier, an Indigenous woman from Canada; and Vednita Carter, a black woman from the US. Their testimonies about the reality of the sex industry were moving, but the stuff of nightmares. It was absolutely clear that prostitution is not another job in need of regulation or unionization. It is a distillation of patriarchy in its purest form.
During the panel, Valisce explained that she rejects the term, “sex worker,” because it glosses over the “sucking and fucking” she had to do. She described her daily routine of standing around for 12-17 hour shifts, wearing only lingerie and six-inch heels, waiting to be chosen by men who would come in bellowing, “Which one of you cunts wants to suck my dick?” This was in New Zealand, where prostitution has been decriminalized since 2003, and is held up as a model of good practice by the pro-prostitution lobby, even though women continue to be killed by johns and pimps.
Perrier was lured into prostitution at the age of 12 and stayed for 10 years. The havoc wreaked by men has left her cervix permanently damaged. As a grown woman, she sleeps with her lights on to keep the nightmares at bay. Perrier talked about the racism she experienced in the industry as an Indigenous woman, and how even funeral homes won’t “touch our dead bodies.” “It’s not the laws that kill our women. It’s not the streets that kill our women. It’s the men,” she said.
Perrier founded Sex Trade 101 to support women who want to leave the industry. She said that 98 per cent of the 400 women she has helped wanted to get out of prostitution at some point. The same point was made by Carter, who has worked with 300-500 women each year, for the last 30 years, through her organization Breaking Free. Carter reports that even women who said they “liked” working in the sex trade complained that they were depressed all the time. “It eats at your soul,” she said.
It seems psychologically and politically consistent that so many of those in the abolitionist movement are female survivors who exited the sex trade. Those who continue to work in the industry not only have a vested interest in its growth, but also in bigging it up — especially to its critics. Fiona Broadfoot (who exited at the age of 26 after 11 years of working in the trade) once told me that she used to challenge anyone who dared question her choice of work, but nonetheless would wash herself, inside and out, with Dettol every night. When I asked Bindel if her research confirmed these experiences in the industry, she said she only came across one survivor among the 250 people she interviewed who continued to promote “sex work” as empowering.
While the gap between the pro-prostitution lobby and abolitionists has grown into a chasm, it was not always so. Bindel’s book reminds us that the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP), founded in 1975, were abolitionists in the early days. Their slogan, “For prostitutes, against prostitution” could easily be the tagline for Bindel’s book. They did not argue that sex work is empowering or enjoyable — they saw it as exploitation, as they saw all labour under capitalism.
In recent years, supporters of prostitution have increasingly framed it as a question of choice and women’s agency. Brooke Magnanti — the self-defined “happy hooker” behind the Belle De Jour blog — popularized that narrative; but by all accounts only a tiny percentage of women freely choose and personally profit from it. And it is their voices we hear the most, echoed by their academic supporters and the pimps, whose vested interests it serves, as Bindel has demonstrated. This narrative of “choice” is the poisoned chalice handed down by neoliberalism to feminism. To continue to believe that women freely choose the lives of violent victimization that were laid before us by the panelists at Bindel’s book launch would be grotesque.
This is why I believe that Bindel made an error of judgment in choosing not to devote any space to trafficking. Although she recognizes its importance, in almost the same breath she dismisses trafficking. In a typically memorable Bindel phrase, she says that “sex trafficking is an embarrassment to the pro-prostitution lobby in the same way that lung cancer is to the tobacco industry.” Quite. Trafficking, based as it is on coercion and deception, undercuts the central argument of the sex work lobby, which claims women are exercising their free choice when they enter the industry. Much energy has been expended by these lobbyists in attempting to separate “sex work” from trafficking — the first is presented as harmless and potentially empowering, only the second is accepted as exploitative and harmful. All the while the obvious fact that a thriving sex industry acts as a green light to traffickers is ignored.
Although the statistics are unreliable and heavily contested, trends show that more and more migrant women are being prostituted in the West. A 2009 studyfound that in a majority of European countries up to 70 per cent of women in the industry were migrant women. While not all of them will be trafficked, this is a telling statistic — it demonstrates the unequal economic desperation of migrant versus local women.
Bindel describes trafficking as “international pimping” and believes “that the only difference between international and local pimping is that some women are pimped across borders, and others are not.” But from the phrase “across borders,” a whole series of vulnerabilities flow, as I argued in my book Enslaved. Most notably, not being able to access the protection of the state, such as it is, and living in the shadow of imminent deportation.
Both lobbies acknowledge it is important to tackle the factors which drive women into prostitution, like poverty. It is no surprise that, as Valisce explained, even when women choose to leave, they can spend years exiting and re-entering the industry because of the difficulties of finding work elsewhere.
As long as women are trapped in these situations, we must focus on exit strategies, while also supporting policies that will ensure that women’s health and safety needs are met and that they can live as free from abuse as possible.
Rahila Gupta is a freelance journalist, writer, activist and longstanding member of Southall Black Sisters. She is author and editor of several books, and is currently collaborating with Beatrix Campbell on a book titled, “Why Doesn’t Patriarchy Die?” which will investigate how patriarchy fits with diverse political systems.
Neither Bazelon’s article nor Amnesty International’s “sex work” policy take into meaningful account the ways in which prostitution functions as a system of colonialism that disproportionately targets Indigenous women and girls. Through these policies and positions, prostitution is sanitized and whitewashed into “sex work,” leaving Indigenous women and girls and our sisters of colour to deal with the consequences.
Today, as the result of the sustained work of Indigenous women and men, increasing numbers of individuals and organizations are beginning to recognize the importance of land to the survival, cultures, and well-being of Indigenous Peoples and the ways in which colonialism violently disrupts these relationships. Slowly, non-Indigenous people are beginning to understand the concept of “unceded territories” and acknowledge the exploitation of lands and “resources” that were forcibly removed from the care of Indigenous Peoples.
Male colonizers were thieves who took what wasn’t theirs because they believed they were entitled to it. But this entitlement didn’t stop at lands — these men decided they were also entitled to the bodies of Indigenous women and girls. According to research done by Melissa Farley, Jacqueline Lynne, and Ann Cotton, Indigenous women and girls in Canada were prostituted through early forts and military bases, and as “country wives” of white fur traders. Indigenous women and girls were targeted for prostitution in part because of lies told about them: they were “squaws” and “savages” who always wanted sex with white men. Prior to the invasion of North America, prostitution didn’t exist among the Indigenous Nations I have encountered — rather, prostitution was imposed on Indigenous women and girls by male colonizers. Entitlement to land continues today as non-Indigenous people live on and exploit Indigenous lands for profit, and entitlement to bodies continues in crisis levels of male violence against Indigenous women and girls.
In her article, Bazelon quotes Liesl Gerntholtz, Executive Director of the Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch (HRW), another organization that has taken a position supporting the total decriminalization of prostitution:
“You’re often talking about women who have extremely limited choices. Would I like to live in a world where no one has to do sex work? Absolutely. But that’s not the case. So I want to live in a world where women do it largely voluntarily, in a way that is safe.”
Gerntholtz and HRW have apparently concluded that it is impossible to imagine a world without prostitution and, in doing so, disregard Indigenous histories and send the message to Indigenous women and girls that we are not worth fighting for. In taking this position, HRW reaffirms the racist myth that Indigenous women and girls (and women of colour) are disproportionately consenting to engage in prostitution because they so desire sex with white men. If we don’t recognize and fight back against the racist, sexist, and capitalist inequalities that funnel women and girls into prostitution and fight back against male entitlement, our only answer to the overrepresentation of Indigenous women and girls in the sex industry becomes: “Because they are ‘squaws’ who desire sex with strangers in disproportionate numbers to white women.” Is this the lie we want to continue to tell to Indigenous women and girls and the message we want to send to the men who buy and sell them?
Unfortunately, Bazelon and HRW can’t (or won’t) challenge male entitlement. Instead, women and girls are told they simply need to find better and “safer” ways to accommodate unchallenged male entitlement to our bodies.
The messages I received from the time I was a girl were meant to keep me “safer”: don’t talk to strangers, don’t walk alone at night, don’t wear short skirts. This messaging (always directed at girls and women) aims to constrain our movements and actions in the name of “safety.” Where is the messaging to boys and men not to rape? Where is the messenging that tells men and boys that they are not entitled to sex whenever, however, and with whoever they want? Where is the challenge to male entitlement to bodies and lands?
We see examples of male entitlement everywhere. The recent case of the Stanford rapist, Brock Turner, is a perfect example. His actions, as well as the light sentence, defence, minimization, and disbelief of Turner’s actions by his father and others, is an example of rape culture: a culture that allows, condones, and even celebrates the rape of women and girls by men. This culture affects all women and girls, but Indigenous women and women of colour in particular ways, leading one to question whether Turner would have even been charged or convicted had his victim been Indigenous or a woman of colour.
Watching these cases, Indigenous women and women of colour see that even a woman with white privilege received a horrific response to her sexual assault, leading us to ask, “If this happened to a woman with a relative level of privilege, what will happen to us?” Regardless of the race of the victim, what all women live through as victims of sexual assault and the ways our lives are constrained by male violence (or the threat of male violence) is a direct result of the patriarchal culture we live in.
Turner raped a woman because he felt entitled to her body. Male entitlement is a foundation of rape culture, yet many who claim to criticize rape culture simultaneously support the decriminalization of pimps and johns, thereby failing to recognize that the very same male entitlement that supports rape culture also fuels the sex industry.
Amnesty says their new policy, “does not argue that there is a human right to buy sex or a human right to financially benefit from the sale of sex by another person.” What the organization doesn’t seem to realize is that, without consequences for the actions of pimps and johns, their policy green-lights and condones those actions. Amnesty International’s policy naturalizes male entitlement to bodies (and lands) by refusing to acknowledge it as part of the foundation of patriarchy, racism, and capitalism and by refusing to challenge it accordingly.
To be clear, I am critiquing the system of prostitution, not the women and girls who are in prostitution. In the same way, I critique Canada’s horrific residential school system without criticizing residential school survivors and critique rape culture without blaming women and girls who have been raped. There is no shame in engaging in prostitution; Indigenous women and girls have been targeted for prostitution since the invasion of Canada by white men. The fact that Indigenous women and girls survive at all in a genocidal culture that hates us and hates all women is nothing short of a victory. But we deserve more than just survival — we deserve fulfilling, joyful lives that are free from male violence or the threat of male violence. We deserve to engage in sexual acts of our choosing, with partners that we choose, who consider our humanity and pleasure, without any form of threat or coercion, economic or otherwise. All those who sell sex should of course be decriminalized and all women and girls should have access to the things we need to build those fulfilling, joyful lives, like safe and affordable housing, nutritious food and clean water, access to education and employment opportunities, and a recognition of our rights to our lands, languages, and cultures. I don’t judge those who find themselves selling sex, but I do judge the men who choose to pay for or profit from the sexual exploitation of women and girls — the vast majority of whom are poor, Indigenous, and of colour. In Canada today, girls are sexualized from a very young age and women still only earn 72 per cent of what men earn for similar work; let’s not pretend girls begin their lives on equal footing.
I’ve witnessed a lot of online praise for Bazelon’s article and Amnesty International’s new policy, and sadly, I’m unsurprised at this show of support. When the status quo (male entitlement) isn’t being challenged, celebration is to be expected. I’m sure many johns and pimps applauded Bazelon’s article and Amnesty’s new sex work policy.
A number of well-meaning individuals and organizations refer to reports by HRW and Amnesty International regarding violence against Indigenous women and girls in Canada as important research in regard to this issue. However, due to these organizations’ position on prostitution, it is obvious to me that neither has an understanding of colonialism and the consequences of this ongoing process on the lives of Indigenous women and girls. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Bazelon fail to understand that, on a fundamental level, white male entitlement to bodies and lands is harmful and sometimes deadly, and that white male entitlement to bodies and lands must always be challenged. Prostitution is the colonization of bodies, and at its heart, is an expression of patriarchy, racism, and capitalism. This is about wealthy, white male domination and control.
I suggest that writers like Bazelon educate themselves further on colonialism and what it means before publishing further on these issues, and that HRW and Amnesty International refrain from commenting on any issue of male violence against Indigenous women and girls in Canada until they are willing to take a stand against male entitlement to women’s bodies and lands.
These positions and arguments are contradictory and cannot be reconciled to advocate for an end to violence against Indigenous women and girls on one hand, and for pimps and johns to buy and sell Indigenous women, without consequence, on the other. Indigenous women and girls don’t need “allies” that refuse to challenge colonialism in Canada and colonial ideologies within themselves.
I want to tell you three stories of winning and losing, of selfishness and sacrifice, of this culture.
Story one. Last spring I gave a talk in a small farming community in northwestern Illinois. I drove there from my previous talk in Wisconsin, passing through prime agricultural territory, which is to say cleared and plowed and empty cornfield after cleared and plowed and empty cornfield. When I got to my destination, a delightful retired teacher took me to see the last remaining unplowed prairie in the county. It was more or less downtown, between a busy street and yet another field devoted to agriculture. As he led me across the slender tract, I couldn’t stop weeping at the sight of flowers who were once common and now barely hanging on, butterflies who were once common and now barely hanging on, a mother goose protecting her nest. My (human) host told me that even though this is the last six acres left—just six acres out of 360,000 in the county—the neighboring landowner refuses to stop applying insecticides and herbicides, which of course drift across the fenceline.
That evening, after he introduced me, I took the stage, sat down, and faced a roomful of members of this farming community. I thanked them for their hospitality, told them of my experiences of the previous twenty-four hours, then said, “I think the plow is the most destructive artifact humans have ever created. It destroys every living being on a piece of ground and converts that land to solely human use.”
The members of this farming community looked back at me. One gave a grim smile, then said, “Those plows paid for our houses.”
I nodded, smiled just as grimly, and responded, “That’s precisely the problem, isn’t it?”
Story two begins with me receiving an issue of my alumni magazine from the Colorado School of Mines, which featured an article titled “Hitting Paydirt.” The article tells stories of several “tremendously rewarding” discoveries. There’s a twenty-six-year-old CSM grad who discovered a “virgin deposit” of 2 million ounces of gold. Another grad discovered what became mines in environmentally ravaged Ireland; environmentally ravaged, war-torn, and rape-plagued Somalia; and environmentally ravaged, war-torn, rape-plagued, and slavery- and child-labor-infested Mauritania (the article, of course, only listed the countries, not their misfortunes, many of which are caused or exacerbated by resource extraction). But the story I want to focus on happened in Bolivia, where CSM grad Larry Buchanan, in the employ of a transnational mining corporation (with an address in the Cayman Islands for tax haven purposes, and having since that time gone through bankruptcy and changed its name, emerging as essentially the same company but without the debt), saw what seemed like a promising geological formation. He looked more closely, and found at the center of the deposit a village, complete with ancient stone church.
Buchanan describes it like this: “The silver deposit lay on the surface, mineralized ledges cropped out everywhere around and below a little indigenous village of rock, adobe and grass thatch, called San Cristobal. The cobblestone streets were paved with silver-bearing rock. The rock walls of the houses literally were laced with silver veins. You couldn’t take a step without touching silver. But somehow [sic] it had been overlooked [sic] by everyone [sic].”
He unintentionally answers his own question as to why these indigenous peoples had never put in an open pit mine: “The Quechua culture of southwestern Bolivia is one of multiple gods and spirits, one with a profound respect for the earth in general and curiously [sic], for rocks in particular. They believe rocks are their direct ancestors, living souls that speak, think, feel emotions, and have distinct personalities.”
Buchanan again: “We discovered nearly a half billion tonnes of those silver-plated ancestors of the Quechua. [Yes, he actually said that.] After a year of work, the engineers calculated it contained nearly a billion ounces of silver, enough ore to last seventeen years of intensive mining. The computer models proved it feasible: the profits would be more than enormous and the mine would become a money-machine. [Yes, he actually said that.] It was a company maker, a world-class discovery, a perfect setup.” The only thing in his way was “that poverty-stricken little village right on top of it. If we wanted to make a mine, San Cristobal had to go.”
But the village didn’t go down without a fight—between white people. Buchanan’s wife was against moving the village and forced Buchanan to sleep on the couch, only relenting when Buchanan agreed that they would move to the village for a while to bear witness to the destruction they were causing (or, to use his words, “the opportunities we were offering the people”). This strikes me as a classic example of the conservative/liberal one-two punch of oppression, with the conservative perceiving the oppression as good in itself, while the liberal bears witness to the oppression without doing much of anything to stop it. So Buchanan and his wife watched as people dug up bones from the village’s four-hundred-year-old cemetery to move to their new compound eleven kilometers away. Buchanan joined village elders as they crawled around the cemetery to beg forgiveness for disturbing the dead. He watched as bulldozers leveled the village in just four hours. It was all very difficult for him: “There were times I was literally brought to tears when I would contemplate what the people lost due to my discovery.”
What was once a living village where people resided with their ancestors in the walls, their gods all around them, is now a huge toxic hole in the ground. But it’s all good. Buchanan believes the people now live better lives in the compound; transnational corporations have made 70 billion dollars; and, best of all, Buchanan and his wife wrote a book about it all. “I came to learn life holds so much more of value than just a few billion dollars worth of silver,” he says. Having learned this valuable lesson, Buchanan moved on to other projects, and believes he has just recently discovered another billion-ounce deposit somewhere else.
Story three involves New Zealand tae kwon do athlete Logan Campbell, who funded his dream of reaching the Olympics through being a pimp. He made a lot of money providing women’s bodies for men to use. He even made a video to recruit women into working for him. The advertisement had lots of pretty pictures of women leaping for joy in fields, standing contemplatively on beaches, and sharing warm hugs with happy children. One female voice-over gushed, “When I was a little girl, I used to dream of a life of liberty.” Another asked, “Did you enjoy that? I sure did.” One said, “I’m living the dream.” And another said, “You deserve it.” The ad never did describe precisely what the “it” is that women deserve, but I think most of us would agree that most little girls don’t dream of economically coerced sexual relations with strangers not of their choosing, of years of post-traumatic stress disorder, of broken psyches and broken genitals and broken lives.
The point, really, is that Logan Campbell did get to live his dream. He went to the Olympics on the bodies of women, just like Buchanan’s “tremendously rewarding find” came at the expense of San Cristobal and its deities, and just as plows pay for houses at the expense of everyone else in the biological community. These are all dreams of fame, accomplishment, money, even what we consider necessities, like the way we feed ourselves and the way we financially accumulate. The problem is, all these dreams are someone else’s nightmare.
These stories are not merely what is wrong with this culture, they are the fundamental ethos of this culture: the fulfillment of personal, social, and cultural dreams at the expense of all others. No sane culture would in any way extol any of these stories. So long as these stories are seen as the fulfillment of dreams, where the subjugation of others is not seen as subjugating them but rather as helping them to “live the dream”; so long as this culture considers actions that lead to the destruction of ancient ways of life as “rewarding finds,” where your own murderous behavior is seen as “offering opportunities” for the victims; so long as we find it not only acceptable but right and just to convert the lives of others and the life-support system of the entire planet itself into fodder for us, there is little hope for life on this planet.
Originally published in the January/February 2013 issue of Orion
Featured image: Men’s rights activists, known for their strong defense of women’s autonomy and freedom, at a pro-prostitution rally.
By Jonah Mix / Gender Detective
As the discussion grows around prostitution law in Canada, New Zealand, Germany, and other nations, a common defense of the sex industry keeps coming up – the idea that laws against prostitution tell women what they can and can’t do with their own bodies, making them paternalistic and anti-feminist. According to these supporters of the sex industry, prostitution is a choice a woman makes; legislating against it (even indirectly, through bans on the purchase of sex) is just another example of patriarchal control over women’s sexuality and a denial of their bodily autonomy. As one commenter put it on a recent blog post of mine, “There is nothing feminist about telling women what kind of sex they should or shouldn’t have. Nothing.”
This question about the interplay between free choice and regulation is a valuable one to have. Unfortunately, almost completely absent from the discussion is a second question: Does prostitution itself tell women what they can and can’t do with their own bodies? How do the demands on behavior made by the sex industry itself compare to the demands on behavior made by legal sanctions against that industry? Supporters of decriminalization are passionate about the impact sex buyer laws might have on women’s sexual freedom – but do they care much at all about the impact of what they’re fighting to decriminalize?
Before I go deeper, I want to make clear that I’m basing this look on the idea of prostitution as a service, which is by no means the only way people understand it. I myself don’t think we should see the sex that takes place in prostitution as a service. But since the people who talk about the sex industry in terms of free choice and bodily autonomy are most likely going to frame it that way, I’m not going to argue the point. Instead, I’m going to argue that the sex-as-service model is incompatible with the idea that we shouldn’t tell women what they can and can’t do with their own bodies.
So, from the start: If sex is a service, then it’s a service purchased like any other: A customer makes a request and offers compensation in return. You ask a plumber to unclog your toilet, and you give him reason to unclog it by offering twenty bucks an hour. You ask a French teacher to help you learn the language, and the French teacher agrees because you’ve offered to pay an enrollment fee in her class. No matter what the service is, every transaction boils down to the simple logic of I want you to do this, and I’m going to provide you with enough of something else that you have reason to oblige.
Without one of those two parts, there’s no transaction anymore. Requesting a service without offering compensation is asking for a favor or making a demand, and compensation by itself is a gift if no request comes attached. Obviously, a client demanding free sex from a woman in prostitution would be rape, and a man giving her money without requesting sex is no longer a client. So for prostitution to be prostitution, we have to have these two features: A man’s request and a man’s compensation.
This notion of a “request” is important. In almost any transaction, the person initiating the purchase of the service is the one who frames the exchange. When you go to hire that plumber, he doesn’t turn around and say, “You know, I see your toilet is clogged, but I’d rather fix this leaky faucet.” Your French teacher doesn’t get to decide the day’s lesson will be on the Baltic languages whether her class likes it or not. Professionals in the service industry might provide advice to customers or guide them from a position of authority, but they’ll never provide a service that doesn’t at least meet some need or desire on the part of the customer. If they did, the customer wouldn’t pay (why would he?) and the transaction would be over.
This doesn’t mean that the service provider’s desires are irrelevant – only that they don’t, by themselves, determine the transaction. For example, I’ve spent years working as an appraiser of rare and antique books, something I absolutely adore. I don’t think I ever appraised a book I didn’t want to appraise, and I went out of my way many times to grow appraisal jobs and guide them towards the best samples I could find. Between poring over old classics and digging up obscure treasures, it was a job I very nearly would have done for free. But it was still the customer’s desire, not mine, that determined what, how, and when I performed my labor. Or, to put it another way, while I said that I may never have appraised a book I didn’t want to appraise, I know for damn sure I never appraised a book the customer didn’t want appraised. How could I? If they didn’t want it, they wouldn’t have been my customer!
Of course, prostitution isn’t comparable to bookselling, even for the people who say it’s a job like any other. But the larger point stands: We’ve all worked a job we didn’t desire, and we all have desires for jobs that don’t and possibly can’t exist. But no one has worked a job their employer didn’t desire be done. In any service industry, it’s the person fronting the bill – he or she who requests the service – that determines what the service will be.
A lot of this seems like boring theoretical busy work, and it very well might be. But the implications for prostitution are enormous. Because prostitution is a service, and because men are overwhelmingly the ones requesting that service, it’s reasonable to assume based on the previous paragraphs that men are the ones who define what prostitution is and how it plays out in the global marketplace. Considering that prostitution involves a physical act, that means that prostitution is an industry in which men tell women what they can and can’t do with their bodies.
Just like a plumber is never going to leave your toilet overflowing while he redesigns your bathtub, and your French teacher is never going to start lecturing in Estonian, a woman in prostitution is never going to perform a sex act that doesn’t align with the desire of a male client. That’s not the same as saying she’ll never have any desire of her own for that sex act (although it’s worth asking if a meaningful proportion do). It just means that her desire isn’t the reason that sex act is being performed. Because I’m stuck at my parents’ house this weekend and their Internet is too slow for most of my video games, I decided to take the time and make a chart showing the intersection of male and female desire in the sex industry:
If a sex act is desired by both the male client and the woman in prostitution, then of course it’s likely to happen. And by the same token, there’s very little chance of two people performing a sex act if both find it unappealing. After that, though, the pattern diverges. If a woman in prostitution actually enjoys a sex act, but her male client doesn’t, his refusal to pay outweighs her desire. But sex acts desired by men and not by women are performed in prostitution all the time, whether through the grudging acceptance of the woman or through unambiguous sexual coercion. Even with a generous estimate, it’s likely that hundreds of women endure unwanted sex acts in prostitution for every man who does the same – or, to put it another way, male desire is literally hundreds of time more influential than female desire when it comes to what sex acts occur in prostitution.
This asymmetry exists everywhere in prostitution, not just in the actual sex. A quick search online for brothels and escort agencies comes back with a range of mannerisms, clothing, and presentation choices that could charitably be described as, well… narrow. Beyond a few specialty schoolgirl outfits, nurse ensembles, and one punk-themed “sex dungeon,” the vast majority of women on display are thin, white, wearing heavy makeup, and displayed in some form of lingerie. (The women who aren’t white are specifically marketed as submissive Asians, “fiery” Latinas, and even more explicit racial epithets for Afrikan women.) Exactly as you’d expect, the vast majority of aesthetic choices made in prostitution align with what men generally find arousing.
Of course, it’s theoretically possible that every single woman in these brothel and escort advertisements has an authentic desire to dress like a schoolgirl or in lingerie (although, again, it’s absurd to actually think that). Regardless, that’s not a reasonable explanation for why those styles are so commonly seen. Many women have an authentic desire to wear jeans and t-shirts. Others wear overalls, sweaters with pictures of woodland creatures, ballroom gowns, or knit scarves. But those are rarely, if ever, seen in prostitution – and, if they are, they would only be seen by men who specified that they had those precise interests. Just like in any other industry, women in prostitution have financial incentive to privilege male interest over any personal desires they may or may not have.
Reading blogs and articles by women in prostitution – including those who explicitly support the industry – you can see this male control extending even further into things like speech patterns, mannerisms, the way a woman laughs, the way she walks, and even their basic identity. I just read a post from a woman who was busy trying to find a more “sensual” name after a few clients told her they didn’t like her real one. Another said she asks men beforehand whether or not they want her to smile, because both “too much” and “too little” smiling can be a turn-off depending on their preferences. Read that again: A woman has to alter how much shesmiles,while being penetrated, based on what a man requests. And this is the industry that liberals defend in the name of bodily autonomy?
Prostitution, as a practice, just is men telling women what they can and can’t do with their bodies. It’s men telling women how to use their bodies, how to move their bodies, how to dress their bodies. What men tell women do with their bodies is the primal guide for how prostitution functions; if we stopped, prostitution couldn’t function. Like all markets, supply responds to demand and the customer is always right. The problem is that the customer wants a fuckable object, not a human being.
Real freedom – not just for women, but for any human being – is incompatible with an industry where rent and food money depends on fulfilling the demands of a stranger. And while all workers suffer under capitalism, we at least tend to see factory work as an expression of control, not liberation. A coal miner isn’t free just because no one tells him he can’t mine coal. The minimum wage shelf-stockers at Walmart don’t have real bodily autonomy just because no one said they can’t take instructions from their boss. It’s a mystery to me, then, why suddenly the legalization of prostitution is seen as a win for women’s freedom, when the result is just a larger set of demands put on their bodies.
Now, I understand the twinge of indignation when some people hear talk about abolishing prostitution. And I understand why “Let women do whatever they want to with their bodies” is an appealing slogan. But if you really aspire to that goal, let me ask: Does that include the woman putting on a miniskirt because she knows she’ll make more than if she wears the jeans she finds more comfortable? Does that include the woman wincing through painful, unpleasant, or just plain boring sex because the alternative is homelessness? Does that include the woman alternating between faking and holding back smiles while a stranger penetrates her? Don’t those women deserve the right to do what they want to with their bodies, and not what the men they depend on for survival want to see done? You may not like that the law sets limits on what a woman can choose to do, but remember: It’s not the law that told her to change her very name for the sake of a man’s erection.
