Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Via Laura Agustín of Border Thinking on Migration, Culture, Economy and Sex, a report out of New Zealand discusses one of the non-surprising benefits of their recent legalization of prostitution: increased leverage for prostitutes in relation to their customers.

After interviewing 772 sex workers, Otago University’s Gillian Abel found workers are more empowered to insist on safe sex and assert employment rights with both brothel operators and clients. Relationships with police have also improved.

‘When it was criminalised, the negotiations were much more covert to try and enforce condom use, whereas now they’ve got the law behind them. One sex worker in Christchurch has taken a client to court for removing a condom. ‘

Read the quote in context here.

One needn’t be enthusiastic about prostitution as a cultural institution to see this as a very, very positive outcome.

The power imbalance between typical workers on the one hand, and their customers, employers/agents, and law enforcement on the other is a huge, huge problem that’s further exacerbated by criminalization. In particular, independent of any social or philosophical problems one might have with sex work*, or legalization of it, and independent of any questions of whether sex work “empowers” those who do it, the blunt fact of legalization provides a tremendous lever that has traditionally been unavailable in negotiations with customers, employers such as pimps or escort agencies, and law-enforcement or other civil entities.

If you’re pro-sex-work it’s a positive development because it brings prostitution a lot closer to the level of enforceable civil and workplace law all other employed or self-employed worker have the right to receive — for instance the right to take legal action against a customer, employer, police officer, or passer by who attempts to rob, rape, rough them up… or even just refuse to leave on a condom. And if you’re anti-sex-trafficking it’s a positive development because it makes it far, far easier for coerced sex workers to come forward and, perhaps even more importantly, it gives sex workers themselves legal avenues for reporting when they become aware of other workers who are being coerced.**

In fact the only two kinds of people I think would be bothered by the direction of this change in the sex-worker status-quo would be people like pimps, cops, and johns who believe sex workers should have no autonomy and no rights because that gives them virtually unlimited power to exploit them and… sex-work abolitionists who believe sex workers should have no autonomy and no rights because that gives them virtually unlimited power to “rescue” them. (Hmm… gee, see a pattern there?)

* And I do have problems with it. The biggest, by far, being the way sex work appears in terms of the no-sex class paradigm’s construction of heterosexual sex as perpetually scarce, inevitably transactional, and desire as necessarily disjoint (men want sex, women want something else) rather than matched. Consequently sex work for me is a symptom rather than a root cause, and therefore there’s zero benefit to society, and quite a bit of harm for workers and even customers, in opposing it in isolation.

** I’m actually curious whether law-enforcement and social-service groups where prostitution isn’t illegal ever recruit legal sex workers to help identify sex workers who really are coerced. To the extent sex workers are altruistic they’re likely to be as concerned about coercion as any other law-abiding citizen. And to the extent they’re no more altruistic than any other law-abiding citizen there’s still the fact that illegal or coerced workers undercut both safety and prices.

Harriet Jacobs of Fugitivus again, this time on an extremely prickly subject I’ve discussed previously: the blurred boundary between subsistence and dependency at the real margins of society. In this case the difference between assistance and exploitation or… well… she puts it rather pithily (emphasis mine.)

I had a social worker friend who once described a conversation she’d had with a female client who was trying to get back on her feet. She had met a new guy that she was very excited about. Oh, sure, there were problems, but who doesn’t have problems? Anyway, he was so committed to her, so committed to working out everything. The woman brushed off the few times he’d encouraged her to have sex with his friends as times that they were all just sooooooo drunk, but it totally strengthened their relationship because they’re not even the jealous types. And, of course, there were all the times that she was just trying to “help him out” on a drug deal. And then those times that she had “cheated” when a friend of his came by and locked her in the bedroom. At the end of her description, the social worker had to try and explain that this woman didn’t have a relationship, or a boyfriend: she had a pimp.

She said it here.

You wouldn’t think this kind of denial could happen. It could.

What’s really harsh, by the way, is that since in circumstances like this the pimp “boyfriend” may be trading his partner for favors or status or cargo rather than cash he may not, strictly speaking, recognize that he’s being a pimp either. Although mostly I’m guessing he’s pretty clear about he’s doing he still might not think of it as pimping.

That would be another problem with stereotypes, especially for those living really marginal lives.

As I said in my own post a couple of years ago

speaking for myself, even though I was sometimes sleeping under overpasses, in cars, or “crashing” at other people’s apartments, and even though my diet was so meager I developed nutritional deficiency diseases, it wasn’t until the 1980s that I realized I’d been homeless. And it wasn’t till very recently that I realized the people we thought of at the time as “in some kind of hot water” probably qualified as trafficked or pimped. So I’m guessing the same is true for a lot of people still in those situations. And not because they’re not there but because there’s there’s so much overlap between the aspirations and difficulties of migration/transience, smuggling, and trafficking that sometimes it’s hard to tell even when you’re in it, let alone from the outside.

I said it here: Between Transience and Trafficking, a Personal Perspective

This isn’t by the way even remotely anything like an excuse. It’s a complication in any scheme to legalize prostitution, which I would still like to see. Or to keep it illegal, which many more people would evidently like to see. Which means, at least to me, that no matter how the pro/anti activism turns out this particular issue will probably need to be addressed by separate policy initiatives.

I don’t have much else to say about it. Except maybe that I think it could be distinguished pretty unambiguously in a page, or even a sidebar, in a comprehensive sex-education curriculum. And so if anyone’s listening I’d really like to lobby for its inclusion. Of course it would also be nice if we could count on students receiving comprehensive sex education in the first place…

I’ll just reiterate that I think Jacobs writes powerful stuff.

Incidentally she closes her post this way…

it’s impossible to ignore rape culture when it calls and makes an appointment, in a whisper and obviously hiding in a closet. When it arrives late on the bus, alone and lost. When it walks in the front door, comes over to your desk, and whispers on the verge of tears, “I need, um, I need, I need the thing.” It’s hard to ignore when it’s curled up in your lobby, unresponsive and unwilling to come back, to interact with you or any representative of the world. It’s hard to ignore when it’s made manifest in a real live girl, a real live girl who has been stripped of the right to disallow strangers access to everything from the waist down. I am acutely aware that many of these girls have been violated, and that I constitute a further violation; my presence announces to them that not only are they not allowed to choose when and with whom they have sex, but they are not allowed to choose how to deal with the consequences of being abused. All I did was pass a job interview, and I am temporarily LordGodKing of her uterus. All she did was own the uterus; why should she get to decide what to do with it? It’s not like she can type up the paperwork. She doesn’t even have a desk.

Again, she said it here.

Powerful stuff.

KJ of ImmigrationProf Blog says

The University of Pennsylvania Law Review will hold a conference on “Trafficking in Sex and Labor: Domestic and International Responses November” on November 13-14, 2009 at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Philadelphia, PA. Human trafficking is currently a major global concern. Rates of trafficking, slavery, and involuntary servitude continue to increase, and the global economic crisis is expected to worsen the problem while frustrating efforts at prevention, prosecution, and remediation. Trafficking also touches upon a broad array of domestic and international legal issues, from policies on immigration and prostitution to gender equality and the problem of violence against women. The issue is currently under active debate in Congress and is likely to receive renewed focus with the change of administration in the United States. The University of Pennsylvania Law Review Symposium will address trafficking in persons—the transportation of people across national borders, often through the use of force, coercion, fraud, or duplicity—from a domestic and international perspective.

KJ

Read the quote in context here.

(Via Google Alerts on the keyword “sex trafficking.”)

A younger friend of mine has this job. She was recruited into it at a very early age… not even twelve when she started doing it. She was very good at it — wound up making far more as an “amateur” than any of the other kids in her school. When she turned 18 she discovered she could make quite a bit more if she kept doing it than she could with any of the other entry-level jobs that were available to her. So she turned pro. Now, as she approaches her 30s, she’s growing weary of it and wondering if she’s up for it anymore and wondering even harder what she could do instead that would make anything like the same money, in this economy. Especially considering how she’s specialized in her particular skills, how she barely made it through high school, and how her prospects of going to college or even a trade school are pretty dim.

There’s a lot of heartache in her line of work. She develops sometimes intensely personal and intimate relationships with her clients but no matter how close they become the clients always move on, always lose interest. And though she tries to keep tabs on them they often forget about her entirely.

Laura Agustín of Border Thinking on Migration, Culture, Economy and Sex says my friend may soon have a hard time getting a visa to do it in Canada. For her own “protection.”

[Canadian Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Jason Kenny’s] ministry issued a media release stating that the proposed amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act will “protect vulnerable foreign workers such as exotic dancers and live-in caregivers who could be victims of exploitation”.

...

According to Wong, one measure to evaluate the vulnerability of a person is insufficiency of funds. “If we allow them in, we are actually putting them in great risk,” Wong told the Straight. Wong confirmed that the bill is driven by Conservatives’ aversion to foreign strippers in Canada. “That is one of the major concerns because, legally, according to admissible criteria, these workers can come in but experience has told us that once they come in, they will be exploited,” she said.

Erika Del Carmen Fuchs of the Justicia for Migrant Workers B.C. doesn’t agree with the Conservative approach. Fuchs told the Straight: “If there’s a problem with human trafficking, they should go after traffickers, not the people being trafficked.”

In May, two Filipino caregivers alleged mistreatment by Liberal MP Ruby Dhalla’s family. The caregivers claimed that they worked 12 to 16 hours a day and that their passports were confiscated. If the bill becomes law and is applied to cases similar to the Dhalla affair, Kurland said that the only remedy available for caregivers would be to get kicked out of Canada.

She said it here.

My friend is a professional nanny.

This is not to say nannying and, say, stripping are directly equivalent professions. But they evidently are similar enough to be treated the same way by… particularly thumb-fingered and/or heartless lawmakers.

Personally I think if one were trying to make workers safer, especially immigrant workers, it would be a better idea to actually protect the workers instead of outlawing them.