Do Migrant Sex Workers Need Saving? March 3, 2008 Jill This article certainly has a controversial premise, and I don’t agree with a lot of it, but it’s an interesting piece nonetheless — and hopefully will provide fodder for some (civil, please!) conversation.
Ok so I have what I think is a 101 question on this topic. Can any one point me to where I kind find _feminist_ discussions of decriminalizing sex work vs. legalizing sex work? Which one is a better for workers? Which provides the most rights and agency? Legalizing could potentially allow for sex workers to be unionized, given benefits, allowing for better healthcare, and enforcing a minimum wage so to speak, but is any of this even vaguely realistic?
To the extent that this article was even coherent enough for me to tease a message out of it, it was repulsive. Apparently, it’s an American/Western notion that sex shouldn’t be something women are economically or otherwise coerced into doing, and we need to understand that with their different cultural ways, desperately poor foreign migrant women actually don’t mind it, as they don’t have our belief that “sex should express love”. (As if that were the main concern of anti-trafficking activists.) Possibly that’s an unfair summary, but it’s pretty much what I’m getting from it. With that breathtakingly offensive argument made, the article then proceeds to say nothing at length- the second page mostly consists of “sex-positive” glurge about how having sex is this learning and fulfilling experience for everybody involved, which in this context seems both tasteless and irrelevant, as frankly, even if you assume someone who isn’t a trafficked slave (the existence of which the article seems to be deny altogether), I very seriously doubt that the average poor, migrant sex worker struggling to survive much cares about how much she’s “learning and teaching through experience how physicality mixes with skill, sophistication, hostility, tenderness, insecurity, respect”, let alone the sort of john who would seek her out. (Interesting how “hostility” gets mixed in there. I have no doubt that a great deal of that is found within that situation, but I do not see it as something to celebrate, to say the least.) As I interpret the general argument of the whole thing, it is, in my opinion, hardly different from the standard right-wing libertarian defense of sweatshops. (“Sure, they’re struggling desperately to survive in horrible conditions, but they choose to do it because it’s the best paying option available to them, so it’s the best of all possible worlds and there’s nothing wrong with it, you whiny bleeding heart liberals.”) The article makes a great deal out of how some women choose to do it as opposed to other less well-paid jobs. Needless to say, the article does not ask the question of how many would choose to do it if they weren’t struggling to survive and trying to find the best-paying of a number of bad options, the answer to which I suspect would not help the author’s case. If the case is that sexual trafficking doesn’t exist, which it sort of seemed to be (she admits that “egregious exploitation” exists, but apparently it doesn’t matter, because there’s all that learning and teaching going on), it was not made even slightly. There are no statistics, there is not even anecdotal evidence- we are simply assured that we just have the wrong perspective and we’re all seeing it as trafficking when it isn’t. Going by this article, I do not see where this author is any different herself than the strawman that she sets up of the arrogant American forcing their own values on migrant sex workers- she basically just informs us that migrant sex workers agree with her, and we are simply supposed to take her word for it. Frankly, I’m disappointed that this earned as approving a link as it did. It might provoke discussion, but so did that Charlotte Allen editorial, and this article in my opinion had barely more to recommend it than that did.
I heard this writer on the radio several days ago. Really I would like to have a whoopee cushion on hand at all times to discharge at people as needed, since sometimes words fail where sound effects would succeed. As far as I’m concerned, whenever I start hearing someone say “blah blah the problem with the sex industry is that people are so anti-sex blah blah and our judgement is more hurtful than blah blah men’s entitlement to purchase women blah”, and especially when it’s a woman and especially when she’s attempting to attach herself to some supposedly avant garde way of viewing the whole thing… it is same shit, different day. Always. But yeah, lady with many assertions and many claims of how no-one-can-prove-I’m-wrong – it is SO HARD and SO EDGY to get a book published that claims us whores just can’t fucking wait to suck your cock and collect your cash. Thank you for giving voice to this oppressed, suppressed view! I had hoped she would talk about something I do find paternalistic and self-aggrandizing among white dudes, with the swashbuckling travelling around the world rescuing women amd children of color from the sex slave trade. Because it is always about what great dudes they are. Always. If I ever got to hear what any of these women and kids have to say about it, I would be willing to take *their* word for it, regarding what their lives are like and how they feel about it. I may have disagreements with these ACTUAL people as well, but so far I have not gotten a chance to find out. But white guy hero or subversive! author who is one more person concerned with her own ability to get attention (say something imaginarily surprising!) – no, they don’t get my ear. But one day, I swear, they will get the whoopee.
and we need to understand that with their different cultural ways, desperately poor foreign migrant women actually don’t mind it, as they don’t have our belief that “sex should express love”. I would like to address how she never mentions, specifically mentions, ANY grouping of women who come from a culture where prostitution is a FINE thing to do if nothing else is an option career-wise. From the many sources I have read to the programs I have seen regarding prostitution in foreign lands – I don’t ever get the notion that THEY (various foreign cultures) are somehow more nonchalant on exchanging sex for goods/services. Heck even in the US, the migrant women from south of the border come from cultures whereby you are either a virgin or a whore – and whores are not treated or viewed kindly. If the author of that piece could cite any one culture whereby its women view prostitution as a valid occupation and would happily take it up elsewhere she may have a point – but til then she is just blowing smoke.
Wow. Such broad romanticization of sex work and sex trafficking is as offensive as demonizing sex workers. While she complains that headlines about sex trafficking deny that any women are choosing the work freely, she completely denies the reality of women who are trafficked and whose bodies are sold, controlled and used by men against their will or with no actual benefit for the women. While trying so hard to insist that women choose sex work over other low-paying jobs that we associate with poor immigrant women, like babysitting, she ignores the very young women who have come to this country with the belief that they ARE going to be employed in such jobs, only to be threatened and coerced into sex work. I agree with Joan Kelly that the self-aggrandizing male rescuer crap is not much better. But surely there can be recognition that sex work, when a woman is forced into it, can be degrading, harmful and violent, that when a woman is coerced or forced it is nothing but repeated, nightly rapes without demonizing sex workers, or holding ourselves up as heroes. I don’t know how much information is presented in her book. But as she doesn’t provide much in the article, it comes across as just another person coopting the experiences of people more disadvantaged as she to superimpose her own values on their lives. I hope the book is more substantial.
Agreed. The article obviously rubbed me the wrong way, and I totally disagree with her, but I thought it was an interesting (and different) take nonetheless.
Is America uptight about sex? Absolutely. But why does that mean that many immigrants who become sex workers in this country aren’t horribly mistreated and exploited and disenfranchised and deserve help? So are people in sweatshops, people who pick crops, etc. Were Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta being patronizing and paternalistic when they tried to help migrant farm workers? What’s wrong with just trying to help someone who is being mistreated? Oh, right, I have to turn a blind eye, lest I be considered some prude. Fuck that. If grape pickers deserve decent living conditions, so do prostitutes.
The more I learn about it, the more convinced I am that sex trafficking meets a huge demand for rape: http://www.emiliedice.com/compartments/?page_id=17 I’m a middle-class American who has worked off-and-on as a call girl, and while I’ve chosen my experience, I’d never in a million years say that it has been all peaches and cream. And I’ve been very lucky! I can’t even imagine the life for trafficked women. Unfortunately many in this segment of the blogsphere, the johns especially, do believe that anyone concerned about human trafficking is brainwashed by the media (news and information is considered “brainwashing” whenever it crashes your party), prudish and a feminazi. Prostitution is a symptom of deep disparities between men and women, and there are many levels of prostituting, from getting a diamond ring for a wedding day, as some people argue, to being a mistress, a courtesan, a streetwalker, a call girl, a stripper, right on down to an exploited migrant trapped in a brothel. There’s a woman’s body out there for every man’s taste, no matter how sick, and it’s a business. Boys will be boys. Men have needs. It’s a “victimless” crime. Browse the links under “Johns and Sex Addicts” on my blogroll to see what a fabulous time they’re all having.