Photo “Pickton pig farm #1” by Flickr user SqueakyMarmot’s. Used under a Creative Commons license.

S.M. Berg of Genderberg, an anti-pron/prostitution blogger who may have been speaking tongue in cheek solidifies an idea I’ve been mulling over since I first started recognizing that the dominant male paradigm holds women not in the sex class of classical feminism but instead in the “no-sex” class, from which, thanks to your passive disinterest in sex, your sexuality must be somehow leveraged or else it will go completely unused (oh yeah, and men are the sex class wherein we’re reflexively, instinctively, compulsively, and animalistically incapable of controlling our libidos.)

Berg’s idea, in brief, is that we need to improve the world’s johns.

The old prostitution paradigm sees prostitution as a women’s problem and thusly suggests fixing women as the solution. Identifiers of the old paradigm that circles around prostituted women are: permits for prostituted women, STD & AIDS checks for women, condoms for women, panic-buttons for women, bad date lines for women, unions for women, government registries for women, “whore college” for women, etc. In my less gracious moments I call proponents of this Victorian, women-as-moral-gatekeepers attitude towards prostitution the Build a Better Whore Brigade, and in generous moods I call them sex worker rights lobbyists.

Read the quote in context here.

Can’t argue with anything but the last clause of the last sentence.** Oh yeah, and the term “prostituted” bugs me but as it turns out we’ll get to that in a minute. Next Berg says

The average age of entry into Portland [Oregon] prostitution is 13-years-old not because there’s a lack of adult prostitutes here, but because Portland johns frequently, willingly choose to rape 13-year-olds.

[A] new john-centric paradigm is needed because prostitution legalization has failed to protect children and women from men’s violence. Legalization should have resulted in decreased male violence against women, decreased sexual slavery, decreased child prostitution, decreased drug dependency, and decreased STD & AIDS. Legalization has not borne out these theorized promises in places like Germany and The Netherlands, where politicians who originally supported legalization have since changed their minds because organized criminals continue to control prostitution despite legalization.

Again a mere quibble: any account of prostitution in Europe that doesn’t take into account it’s tantamount-to-racism xenophobic distinctions between native and immigrant and, especially, undocumented and too-often involuntarily trafficked immigrants. The laws are shitty, the natives are shitty, the anti-prostitution activists there are shitty… but above all the customers who generally knowingly frequent trafficked/undocumented prostitutes because they’re less expensive are shitty. And while I’ll actually quibble all day about the dire unsuitability of prostitution models in, especially, Western Europe, we’re now looking at two counts: too many men really are paying for 13-year-olds in Portland (and the rest of the world) and too many men really are knowingly frequenting coerced prostitutes in Europe (and the rest of the world.)

Oh, and elsewhere in the blog Berg quotes a Vancouver Sun editorial

It’s a terrible indictment of our society that prostitutes are 40 to 120 times more likely to be beaten, raped or killed than the general population.

And Vancouver (even more than Seattle and Portland) has had it’s share of beaten, raped, and killed prostitutes.

But here’s where a major, major quibble with the prospect of licensing only customers comes in: it’s not just customers who rape, rob, beat up, and turn their backs*** on prostitutes. In fact even (and possibly especially) if the prostitutes don’t have pimps there are ordinary mafia “protection” types, corrupt police who shake prostitutes down for sex to avoid arrest, suburban “bum thumpers” who recreationally prey on vulnerable street people including subsistence prostitutes, and, of course, thanks to their vulnerability especially in the face of their need to avoid detection and arrest prostitutes are the primary victims of serial murderers (who’ve killed up to 400 between, roughly, Vancouver and Portland since the late 1970s.)

So licensing johns? Eh, you might have to license a hell of a lot more men (and, face it, they’re virtually all men) than that.

And that ultimate quibble brings home Berg’s final point

We need to unstick from the idea that men’s desire for sex is an immovable force of nature so uncontrollable that all we can do is “fix” prostituted women to withstand the frequent violence johns inflict. ...Men’s violence is not about prostituted girls…it’s about communities confronting the male privilege that lets them get away with abusing prostitutes or any women.

As always when I raise this point, if you’re a sex-worker with only great clients and has never in his or her life has ever felt endangered by customers or non-customers, or if youre a customer who’s never been abusive well… obviously none of this applies to you. And congratulations, by the way. I know there really are some of you out there. Although somebody killed those sex-workers in Vancouver and fed their bodies to pigs. Somebody’s shaking down prostitutes in exchange for “protection” either from other criminals or from arrest. And somebody really is beating the black eyes and limping walks out of the subsistance/street prostitutes I occasionally see when I’m driving from my nice urban-neighborhood home to the nice, practically antique shopping mall with its Target and Nordstroms and California Pizza. I’m pretty sure it’s not their moms.

The point being that licensing, legalizing, and even lauding sex workers really does go only so far, as does training women to avoid sexual survival situations at the hands of men. At some point you’ve got to begin outreach to um, men/us/you/me. Because to the extent we have a right to sexual self-expression at all, and to the extent some men really prefer prostitutes to other partners, we also have rather high self-interest in encouraging self-responsibility in ourselves and our peers. We typically perceive ourselves as the primary victims of “sexual scarcity.” And yet we’re also the primary contributors to the conditions that create the real scarcity (of trust, for instance, or sense of safety, for another, of peer-respect, for a third, and the list goes to at least 104) that’s responsible for the perception of sexual scarcity.

(Via Louise Livesey at The F-Word)

[** The going line amongst anti’s is that it’s clinically and possibly genetically impossible for women to participate in sex-worker rights advocacy. (Sorry Dacia, Amber, Ren, Elizabeth, etc., etc.) —fl]

[*** Why I’m given to understand that even anti-prostitution activists contribute to the de-humanization of prostitutes by resolutely announcing as far and wide as possible that such individuals practically sub-human thralls with neither agency nor self-sufficiency nor (speaking of Victorians!) the gumption nor decency to avoid their fates… and whereas I’m sure most anti’s aren’t outright gleeful any time a new prostitute turns up robbed, hurt, or killed I’m also sure they appreciate the extinction of another human being more for the rhetorical weight than the, you know, cost to humanity. —fl]