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The Guardian, Letters, Friday 21 November 2008 • The government, spurred on by those feminists Cari Mitchell mentions (Letters, November 17), has announced new laws on prostitution. This obsession with sex work as uniquely degrading obscures more widespread exploitation. In Julie Bindel's article ('Marriage is a form of prostitution', G2, November 12) lesbian feminist Sheila Jeffreys says prostitution is a "massive industry where the profits are not going to the women". Name an industry where the profits go to the workers, especially the women! And compare the wages. While few sex workers make good money, even those at the bottom earn more than they would in most other jobs. Women's hourly wages range from a minimum £5.73 (less for young and undocumented workers) to an average £11.67. The cheapest trick pays more, and it takes far less than an hour. Should we stick to low wages to satisfy Ms Bindel's moralistic prejudices? Lesbian women have campaigned for years for sexual choices. This includes immigrants who come here to lead lesbian lives and find their way to the sex industry to survive and send money to families back home. Why are influential lesbians telling those with least - gay and straight - what to do with our bodies? Sex work disgusts them, but not poverty.
Virginia Woolf considered
that "to sell a brain is worse than to sell a body". While we earn
an honest penny on our backs, academics and journalists make money
off our backs. We call it pimping.
So, the government is proposing a set of measures whose aim is to control, criminalise and punish those who purchase sex, with the most punitive responses reserved for those who buy sex from women who are trafficked or exploited by a pimp (For men who pay for sex with trafficked women, ignorance is no longer a defence, November 19). Surely Jacqui Smith and others in the government know that such proposals are unworkable in practice. But no matter - they will, we are assured, deter potential purchasers, and through this will work towards ending or at least reducing "the virtual slavery" of women in prostitution. In other words, even though selling sex is legal, the Home Office is proposing a set of measures which are largely symbolic: they send a message to the population about what is considered acceptable and what is not. How fitting for an area of policy where myth and conjecture often masquerade as fact, where force and compulsion are confused with the cancerous social and personal effects of (global) poverty, social exclusion, drug and alcohol problems and so on; where an individual sex worker's possibly violent, possibly exploitative relationship with a partner is no longer seen as domestic violence and abuse, but becomes seen as something different (ie pimping). How fitting for an area where the complex realities of the sex industry - from street work to escort and specialist services, from the drug-addicted stereotypical victim of men to the highly knowledgable, self-assured and confident businesswoman - are ignored by government in the service of headline-grabbing proposals that do nothing to address the underlying problems of women's poverty and men's violence.
In their drive to tackle
prostitution, perhaps the government should think more about being
tough on causes of women's poverty and less punitive about the ways
such poverty is survived.
• I urge the home secretary
immediately to make it an offence to buy leeks produced with the
help of somebody who is "controlled for another person's gain", to
stop exploitation of eastern Europeans on British farms (Police raid
farms in human trafficking inquiry, November 19). A plea of
ignorance should be no defence for any shopper facing prosecution
for buying vegetables produced by workers in Lincolnshire fields who
have been trafficked or are being exploited. This would bring this
area of anti-human-trafficking legislation into line with that on
prostitution. Consumers of all products or services should be made
policemen against these vile practices. The government should also
urgently consider legislation against eating chocolate produced by
child labour in west Africa.
Feminist contempt for prostitutes The Guardian, Letters, Monday 17 November 2008 What is most striking about feminist reporters who single out prostitution as worse than any other industry is their contempt for prostitute women. Zoe Williams describes sex workers as either "better at sex than they are at anything else" or "so disadvantaged that they may as well have been kidnapped" (Turned off by tart-lit, November 13). There is no sisterly understanding of, no identification with, women who for a variety of reasons, but mostly because of pressing economic need, work in the sex industry; no appreciation of the social skills required for a job that deals not only with men's egos, but with the constant threat of arrest and its dire consequences, especially for women's safety and keeping families together. (Who would risk reporting a violent man if you may end up in prison yourself and be separated from your children?) Being good at sex (or at faking it) does not mean you have no other skills; being disadvantaged does not mean you are not a caring mother.
Many clients are more
respectful of the women whose services they pay for than feminists
who claim to speak for us. If these feminists spent as much time
looking at what we have in common as women as they now spend
distancing themselves from us, feminism would be less arrogant,
repressive and out of touch. And feminists in government would worry
about our rights rather than our "rehabilitation".
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