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How Prostitution Became the Worlds Most Modern Profession
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Posted on Sep 7, 2016
By Kajsa Ekis Ekman
A demonstrator outside the National Assembly in Paris in 2013, as a French
bill aimed at decriminalizing prostitutes and fining their customers was
meeting strong opposition in the Senate. (Christophe Ena / AP
Photo(http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/France-Prostitution/87cdc0af09e
44187abebd8b0d662c956/1/0) )
When it came to
light(http://www.faber.co.uk/blog/a-human-rights-scandal-by-kat-banyard/)
that the vice president of one of the sex-workers organizations consulted
by Amnesty International over its prostitution policy was a sentenced human
trafficker and pimp, many abolitionists were appalled, but not surprised.
Sex-workers rights has increasingly become a euphemism for the rights of
pimps, brothel owners and men who pay for sex.
The sex work discourse has turned the worlds oldest profession into the
worlds most modern profession. Prostitution is no longer seen as a feudal,
patriarchal remnantit is subversive, liberating, even feminist. To the
womens movement, prostitution was sold as a womans right to her own body;
to neoliberals, as a symbol of the free market; to the left, as sex work
needing unions and labor laws; to conservatives, as a private agreement
between two consenting individuals outside of societys interference; to the
LGBT movement, as sexuality demanding its right to expression.
Prostitution has become a chameleon, adapting itself to all ideologies. And
when the left embraces prostitution as work, it is without the Marxist
understanding of work as something inherently alienating that should be
abolished, and that results in the loss of the workers capacity to
determine his or her own life. Also absent is the awareness of how
capitalism expands incessantly into more and more dimensions of our lives,
causing us to view our bodies and minds as nothing but commodities.
The sex work discourse was initially marginal, emerging from the creative
and chaotic California political milieu. It gained importance when it was
promoted by the Dutch government in preparation for the re-legalization of
the sex industry. The Netherlands, with its booming sex industry, obviously
had economic incentives in taxing it. The argument that prostitution was a
job like any other came in handy. But if prostitution was to be considered a
job, the existence of unions was pivotal, and the Red Thread (de Rode Draad)
became the first such union to be known worldwide.
The Dutch government founded the Red Thread. It was marketed as a trade
union for sex workers, but since its inception it has been funded by state
money, and its leadership has always comprised sociologists rather than
people in prostitution. Hotels in Amsterdam hand out brochures to tourists,
reassuring them they are not to feel guilty about paying for sex, since
many prostitutes belong to the Red Thread union. References to it became
almost compulsory in feminist anthologies from the 1980s onward. And yet the
Red Thread never had more than 100 members, never had a dispute with a
single brothel, and its
representatives(http://www.sexworkeurope.org/users/sietske ;) , such as
sociologist Jan Visser and author/academic Sietske Altink, had no experience
of prostitution.
Altink, at a conference in 2009,
said(http://www.epsu.org/sites/default/files/article/files/European_Conferen
ce.pdf) that demand for prostitution would decline, since since wives have
gotten better at sex. She now works at the International Committee on the
Rights of Sex Workers in Europe (ICRSE), where, curiously enough, one often
finds the same politicians, academics and social workers appear again and
again, building their careers on speaking about the right to do something
they personally have not done.
And as the sex industry grew worldwide, the sex-work discourse achieved
hegemonic status. Segments of the left and the feminist movement swallowed
the propaganda hook, line and sinker: To fight for prostitution was to fight
for freedom. This is strange indeed.
A hundred years ago, the fight against prostitution was crucial to both the
labor and womens movements. Remember the British docker unions classic
posters, which proclaimed, We shall not cease until all destitution,
prostitution and capitalism is swept away and An injury to one is an
injury to all? It was apparent to the male dock workers that prostitution
sentenced their sisters of the working class to be used by upper-class men,
and they were not going to let that happen. The womens movement took up the
fight against prostitution before it even demanded the right to vote: to get
rid of the slave trade was the most urgent matter.
Prostitution has not changed. It is the same industry, the same rich men
buying poor women, the same exploitation, the same violence and the same
trafficking (then referred to as the white slave trade). What has changed is
the label. As Sonia Sanchez, an Argentinian survivor of prostitution,
writes(http://cualestuputaesquina.blogspot.se/) : This is a feminism which
is very useful for the pimps ... a movement without any movement, run almost
exclusively by academics, far from popular feminism.
I spent four years traveling Europe and researching the sex work
organizations for my book, Being and Being Bought. I saw the same pattern
repeatedly: a sex work organization with a fancy website and impressive
online presence, boasting hundreds or thousands of members with sex-work
experience, would in reality consist of three people having coffee. This was
the case, for example, with the group Les Putes (now called STRASS) in
France.
Another recurring situation would involve academics and nongovernmental
organization workers composing the whole board, while a single person in the
organization would have experience in prostitution. This person, of course,
would be the one speaking to the media, as with the ICRSE. There was not
even one prostituted person in the Spanish organization Ambit Dóna, despite
its claim to stand up for the right to be whores. Sometimes, existing
trade unions would open a chapter for people in prostitution, as with the
Confederación Sindical de Comisiones Obreras (CCOO), the largest trade union
in Spain, or the German ver.di, with meager results. Not a single person in
prostitution joined the CCOO. The German union branch for sex workers told
me it never had more than a few members and had never had any industrial
dispute, despite the fact that Germanys prostitution industry is the
biggest in Europe, with more than a million people selling sex every day.
Equally disappointing were the
results(https://ec.europa.eu/anti-trafficking/sites/antitrafficking/files/fe
deral_government_report_of_the_impact_of_the_act_regulating_the_legal_situat
ion_of_prostitutes_2007_en_1.pdf) of Germanys legalization: Only 1 percent
had registered as sex workers. When the German states official inquiry
asked why, many women in prostitution replied that they hoped to get out of
prostitution as soon as they could and did not want to see it as more than a
temporary solution.
Huschke Mau, a German survivor of prostitution,
writes(https://purplesagefem.wordpress.com/2015/06/04/prostitution-survivor-
to-pro-lobby-im-sick-and-tired-of-you/) :
Just like the majority of all prostitutes, I did not register as such
because I was afraid that then I wouldnt be able to exit. Because I was
afraid of being asked why I didnt want to work as a prostitute any more, as
this was a job like any other. And this is exactly what happened when I
wanted out. I had been seeking help at the public health department and only
received incomprehension. And I didnt get out. What was I supposed to tell
the employment office when asking for unemployment benefits so that I didnt
have to suck ten dicks a day any longer, so that I could have a place to
stay and something to eat? With what, they would ask, how had I made a
living in the past three months? And if I had told them, would they have
asked me why I didnt want to continue doing it, there was such a great
brothel nearby, theyre still hiring.
?
One woman told me she turned to sex-work organizations hoping to find
shelter, only to be used as a campaigning tool. TAMPEP, another Dutch
organization, receives millions of euros from the European Union to combat
HIV. It uses the money to distribute condoms to migrant women and to
campaign for decriminalization. When I spoke to its representativeanother
social workershe said that women often ask her to help them out of the
industry. But, she replied, Our job is not to get women out. Our job is to
teach them to be better prostitutes.
Sometimes, behind the screen of sex-workers rights, one even finds pimps.
Thats the case with the British International Union of Sex Workers (IUSW),
which is run
by(https://toomuchtosayformyself.com/2009/01/09/the-great-iusw-con/) the
escort agency owner Douglas Fox. Even while he owns one of Britains biggest
escort services, Christony Companions, Fox calls himself an independent male
escort and speaks
repeatedly(http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/866713.we_dont_sell_sex_for
_a_living/ ) in the press of sex-worker rights and the evils of feminism.
This is an international phenomenon, and Mau calls it
out(https://survivormegaphone.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/the-lefts-love-of-pro
stitution-an-open-letter-from-exited-women/) :
You refer to BesD [a German Sex-Worker Organization] as organized sex
workersyou do realize that they only represent 0.01 percent of the
prostituted in German? What kind of organization for the prostituted is this
if it includes brothel owners? The exploiters start a union to represent
the workers?
That a boss doesnt have the same interests as the worker is usually obvious
to the leftbut not when it comes to prostitution. The IUSW was quickly
invited to become a branch of the British trade union GMB and remains so.
The idea of sex-worker unions is a powerful one. During my research,
however, I did not come across a single organization that actually functions
as a union, meaning that it is founded and funded by its members and is
composed only of people in the industry, and whose counterpart is employers
and profiteers. Most of these groups are actually interest groups that
strive to legalize all aspects of the sex industry through the labeling of
prostitution as work.
What is odd about many self-proclaimed unions for sex workers, apart from
their lack of members and a total failure to initiate disputes with pimps
and brothel owners, is their insistence that sex work is great. Other trade
unions speak of vocational hardships, long hours, the risks and the fight
for benefits. And prostitution has occupational
hazards(https://archive.is/zUwm ;) that few other jobs come close to: 82
percent of people in prostitution have been physically assaulted, 83 percent
have been threatened with a weapon and 68 percent have been raped. The death
rate(http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/159/8/778.full ;) among women in
prostitution is higher than for any other group of women, including homeless
women and drug addicts. Would a union that truly represented people in
prostitution not speak of that? But many of the above-mentioned groups do
the opposite: They cover up the problems. They say only how self-fulfilling
it is to be in prostitution, what a true liberation from patriarchy it is,
and what a great way it is to test ones boundaries.
Let me tell you, that is something you never hear on the street.
Kajsa Ekis Ekman is a Swedish writer and author of Being and Being
BoughtProstitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self and Stolen SpringThe
Eurocrisis Seen From Athens. She is a member of the Center for Marxist
Studies Sweden and lectures internationally on womens rights, crisis theory
and capitalism. She writes for the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter.i>
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